Spokane County spending $250,000 to make website user-friendly

Thirteen images line the left side of the Spokane County’s homepage at www.spokanecounty.org. Want to pay your taxes? Click the water-spotted leaf urging you to “Go Green.”

In an effort to make tasks such as paying bills and applying for a marriage license more intuitive, county commissioners on Tuesday approved a $250,000 overhaul orchestrated by Civic Plus, a Kansas corporation that has grabbed a big market share in Washington handling government websites. Civic Plus has signed website design contracts with Pierce and Snohomish counties and the city of Liberty Lake in recent years.

“We haven’t exactly made it easy with our website,” said John Dickson, the county’s chief operations officer.

Changing the county’s Web presence is part of an effort to optimize services for a mobile crowd and to offer an experience that is customer-focused, Dickson said. The rollout is tentatively scheduled for spring.

John Bottelli, assistant director for the Spokane County Parks Department, led the team that negotiated with Civic Plus. The company originally offered to do the work for a little more than $300,000, Bottelli said, and the county was able to haggle for a price tag of $247,663. The county will pay that out in equal installments over two years.

“We did a lot of research with what other communities needed to pay for similar projects, and we took a population-type approach to it,” Bottelli said.

Pierce County, which is nearly twice the size of Spokane County, paid the company about $410,000 in the first year to revamp its website in 2014, which had been running without a major upgrade for more than a decade. Snohomish County, which has about 240,000 more people than Spokane, paid $295,000 over the first two years to upgrade its website in 2013.

Civic Plus received a 10-year federal government contract in 2007 to provide technological services to local governments. More than 1,800 such customers have signed contracts with Civic Plus, the company reports.

Civic Plus provides off-site hosting of the website and maintenance, which will allow county workers to continue focusing on other things, said Becky Gehret, director of Information Services for the county.

“We had to assign the couple of people who were working on the website to other tasks,” Gehret said. “We haven’t been able to add new functionality to the website.”

The county expects to pay around $35,000 annually for maintenance of the website.

While Spokane County decided to hire an outside contractor to update its website, the city of Spokane opted instead to build its website in-house, said Brian Coddington, spokesman for the city. The city’s website recently left beta testing after two years of development under a crew of about three people who weren’t exclusively working on the new website, he said.

Spokane County Commissioners Todd Mielke and Shelly O’Quinn both voted Tuesday to move forward with the website redesign, with colleague Al French absent.

Dickson said the new website, with a release that will coincide with a new logo, should mirror Spokane County’s move to a customer-centric approach. He acknowledged that the investment into a website redesign represented “a chunk of change,” but the move will spotlight cost-saving opportunities elsewhere and improve customer service.

“It’s the ‘Google’ approach,” he said. “We want one or two clicks, then to be right there.”