Tualatin shows off new city website staging site; council invited to beta test

Deputy City Manager Meghan George and Creative Communications Manager Heidi Stanley on Wednesday walked the Tualatin City Council through a staging version of the city's redesigned website, showing new navigation, a prominent search bar, alerts, and feature pages for services such as permits, the library and Parks & Recreation.

The redesign is a multi-phase project that moved into development and content migration late last year after the Council-authorized contract with JuiceBox. "We are here to provide an update on our website redesign project," Meghan George said, adding that staff received access to the staging environment in December and have been migrating and revising content since then. George told the council the contract ceiling is $150,000 and the project has used about $105,000 so far.

Stanley demonstrated homepage features that include an announcement/alert bar for weather or facility closures, a large search interface with customizable popular searches, hover states and animated elements, and a prominent events/calendar feed. She showed service-specific landing pages for building permits and inspections, a library landing page with direct access to the library catalog, and a boards-and-committees accordion that lists city boards and whether applications are open. "I'm really excited to share this with you," Stanley said as she previewed the site.

Staff told council members they are still working through integrations with third-party systems, including the city's meeting-packet system (Unicode Meetings), the regional library catalog (WCCLS) and the community registration system (CommunityPass). Some items will be embedded or linked if direct integration isn't feasible; permit applications will continue to live in TrackIt and the site will link to guidance pages explaining how to use that system.

The team plans structured beta testing with staff, interested council members and community volunteers before final launch, and will provide training materials and recorded sessions for internal users. The site will deploy translation via a Google Translate plugin for broad language coverage, with manual translations for pages city staff want to ensure are fully accurate.

Staff said they will return to council when they are preparing for public beta testing and launch. The city did not set a final launch date during the presentation.