City of Allentown: A DNN City Website, Then a New UI

About the City of Allentown website

The City of Allentown website is how residents look up city information and services. Content editors inside the city publish it. The site runs on DNN, the .NET content platform formerly called DotNetNuke.

Support and redesigns from 2012

The city hired Maxiom in January 2012. The first job was support for the existing website. The city provided wireframes. We configured the application so it stayed secure and current.

From there the work became a series of redesigns. We adjusted the color scheme and the templates, and we wrote custom modules that integrate with other web services. The main development of that generation of the site ended in early 2013. A later project made the pages mobile responsive and finished in 2015. Support continued after both of those builds. The stack the city and Maxiom named for the work is .NET, DNN, and IIS hosting.

Content editors said they could manage the site with little friction, and usability complaints stayed low. The city logs support issues in a help desk. From January 2012 through July 2018, the city had spent $128,000 with Maxiom. Antonio Chagoury managed the work and pulled in design or development as each project required.

A later UI and UX redesign

A separate design engagement set out to make the site easier to navigate, current in its visuals, and usable on a range of devices, including for people with disabilities. The city's accessibility requirement was that residents could reach the content.

We interviewed stakeholders, used existing user research, and wireframed the new structure with those stakeholders. Visual design covered type, color, and the hierarchy of the content, so the information residents need is easy to find. The pages were built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and tested across major browsers and devices.

The city's CMS was already DNN. The roadmap for that design was to turn the new interface into a theme for the DNN site the city had been running for years, so editors would publish the new design in the system they already knew.

What a city homepage has to do

• Find a service. Residents arrive with a task. Navigation and the content hierarchy have to make that task obvious.
• Work on a phone. The 2015 update made the pages mobile responsive. The later design was built for a range of screen sizes.
• Stay editable. Content editors publish in DNN. Custom modules extend the CMS where a plain page is not enough, including connections to other web services.
• Stay maintainable. Security updates, a help desk, and a team that already knows the city's DNN installation are how the site keeps running between redesigns.

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