Overview

This section contains information about some of the fun and unique projects I was involved in while employed with the City and County of Denver.

Background

As early adopters, the city shifted it's Web site (www.denvergov.org) to a content management system in 2001. It featured a variety of standard templates that enabled staff in city agencies to autonomously publish content without changing the design of the main site. The department I worked for maintained the CMS, including bug fixes, creating new templates, training agency liaisons, and supporting its use.

My Role

It's hard to summarize five years of work in an environment where you wear multiple hats. It is easiest to think of my role as a combination of User Experience Architect and Managing Editor.

In one capacity, I served as technical advisor for the overall structure of the Web site as it evolved and as new features were added, including determining how and where they may be integrated into the site (information architecture), how they may be designed or displayed (design, usability, accessibility, functionality), and how people might locate those features (content hierarchy, navigation, marketing).

In the second capacity, I served as creative manager to present site-wide content in a friendly, easy-to-understand manner using a consistent voice and style so that it could be easily digested by a wide and diverse audience.

My deliverables were typically things like identifying business requirements, functional specifications documents, content outlines and site maps, graphics design, user interface prototypes and layout mockups, Web page construction and front-end coding, writing and copywriting, fact-checking, copyediting, and content development. This was in addition to my typical day-to-day responsibilities of training and supporting agency contributors, graphics optimization, content maintenance, and other site management tasks.

All aspects of my work involved regular collaboration with teams of people, including designers, project managers, city agency representatives, offices of elected officials, developers, public relations staff, public safety personnel, community representatives, subject matter experts, the general public, and even the city's legal counsel.

The production process often entailed coordinating site features and content with other projects and the city's marketing initiatives, so prioritizing work to meet multiple deadlines was routine.