Annapolis will roll out redesigned, ADA-compliant website on Feb. 9

The City of Annapolis will roll out a redesigned website next week aimed at improving accessibility and updating for the social media era.

The redesign of annapolis.gov will go online Tuesday, according to a statement released by the city, the first substantial overhaul in about five years.

The city does not anticipate the entire site to be down or inaccessible at any point during the changeover, however, some individual pages may be briefly down as they are updated, said Mitchelle Stephenson, city spokesperson.

The redesign was completed in partnership with CivicPlus, a web development service that specializes in building sites for municipal and county governments. The project was overseen by the city’s web team at no expense to taxpayers, Stephenson said, and would typically have cost tens of thousands of dollars if done by an outside contractor.

City Manager David Jarrell praised the city’s web team for its efforts on the project.

“We have an incredibly hardworking team in the city and they strive to ensure that residents have easy access to timely information,” he said.

The site will feature a streamlined home page that is more mobile-friendly and features some of the most popular websites such as the 2020 Comprehensive Plan and resources related to COVID-19 and the city’s recovery efforts. There will also be a new section dedicated to the city’s social media outreach including a mini RSS feed that collates all its social media posts, new videos and access to the city’s YouTube channel.

The overall content of any given page is not expected to change, Stephenson said, but there will be alterations to fonts, styles and layout that are in part meant to comply with requirements from the Americans with Disabilities Act such as hover tags on photos, bigger fonts and white space for readability. There will also be dozens of new photos added to parts of the website.

In all, there about 50,000 dynamic pages, like news releases and legislative sections and about 2,000 static pages, such as department landing pages. The website typically sees more than 130,000 page views and 100,000 unique visitors each month, the city said.

Any technical issues or broken links found by visitors after the rollout should be reported to the webmaster at webmaster@annapolis.gov.