The Aurora City Council recently approved an agreement for a remake of the city’s website.
Aldermen on Nov. 14 approved a three-year subscription with two option years for a complete website redesign with Denver-based Granicus for a total of about $1.3 million.
The contract would actually be $584,090 for the website remake. The rest of the money would be for Granicus digital services the city already receives for such items as Legistar, which is used to put background information for council items online, and the Gov Q&A service already on the website.
The contract replaces one the city originally had with Citybase for a website remake.
City officials said there were “gaps in the project” started more than a year ago, and officials decided they were not getting the value they should out of it.
At that point, the city engaged with Granicus, one of the top website providers in the country, which in the meantime had purchased one of the other top website providers, OpenCities.
Officials said between the work the city already has done with Granicus, and the number of cities that use the OpenCities platform, city officials decided to talk to Granicus about a contract with Aurora.
More than 170 cities in the U.S. use the Granicus OpenCities website platform, including Denver, Colorado; Miami and Orlando in Florida; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and San Antonio, Texas.
The agreement includes Granicus’ Communications Cloud and Engagement HQ tools that will allow the city’s Communications Department to consolidate other communications work into one cohesive website platform, according to city officials.
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That will allow the department to continually engage residents of Aurora with emails, surveys and text messaging, they said.
The agreement also includes the Granicus Experience Group, their top-level consulting services to ensure the design, content, copywriting and website experience follows the most effective best-practices.
The first phase of the project takes six to eight months, and the total project for the website remake takes 14 to 18 months, officials have said. If the city failed to get an answer back to Granicus yet this month, it would fall behind in line and the project could not start until next year.
City officials have said with the bundling of all the services with Granicus, the city will will spend $16,289 less on the website remake than it would have originally, and the overall value will be better, too.