A New Website for the City of Destiny
About
The City of Tacoma, also known as the City of Destiny, is the third-most populous city in the State of Washington. Its website serves as the primary platform for engaging with residents, businesses and visitors, offering information about Tacoma, facilitating government-citizen communication, providing digital services and promoting transparency.
Problem Overview
The City’s website was more than a decade old and no longer aligned with how people expected to access information and services online. With 12,600 pages, 340 Calendar entries, 360 workspaces and 80 web forms, users struggled to quickly find essential information. What’s more, 130 web stewards across 15 departments faced an array of challenges managing and updating website content. The City needed a modern, service-oriented platform that improved findability, strengthened accessibility and compliance, clarified governance and enhanced overall security.
A Service-Oriented Digital Experience
In-person user research sessions at SiteCrafting’s user experience research lab revealed improving findability as the top priority across stakeholder groups. Residents consistently demonstrated a need to quickly locate a range of services, council meetings, updates and alerts, as well as find answers to common questions. These findings informed the restructured information architecture that prioritizes tasks over departments. Navigation was redesigned around user intent, supported by improved search configuration and content tagging.
Target benchmark: Achieve a 70% or greater success rate for top-task findability.
Early usability testing indicates measurable improvements in task completion speed and success rates compared to the previous structure. March 2025 tree testing of the new navigation resulted in a 25 percentage point improvement, while directness rose by 20 percentage points.
Accessibility and Usability by Design
Accessibility was embedded into the foundation of the rebuild. The new website was designed to meet WCAG and ADA compliance standards while improving readability, device responsiveness and interaction clarity. Cultural inclusivity, language accessibility and consistent access to online services were prioritized to ensure residents can engage with City resources regardless of ability, device, or bandwidth. Accessibility is now part of the governance model, not an afterthought, and the City is prepared ahead of the April 24, 2026 ADA Title II digital accessibility compliance deadline.
Residents played a central role in shaping a more usable website for the community. We began with baseline usability testing of the existing navigation and gathered more than 6,000 pieces of visitor feedback through the website. We also engaged residents in two open houses and conducted two focus groups that included guided walkthroughs of the site.
To validate the improvements, we conducted a formal usability study with local residents on both desktop and mobile. The results showed an average satisfaction score of 6.45 out of 7 and a 91% task completion rate, which demonstrates strong usability and user confidence across devices.
Modernizing Design, Enhancing Engagement
City leadership wanted a contemporary visual system that reflected Tacoma’s identity while improving usability. The refreshed design introduces a mobile-first framework, stronger visual hierarchy, consistent components across departments, and centralized governance for microsites and special initiatives. By consolidating fragmented web properties under a unified design system, the City strengthened brand cohesion and long-term digital governance.
The new platform improves how residents connect with their local government by elevating online services, highlighting alerts and updates, clarifying pathways for reporting issues, and surfacing key projects and City priorities. By prioritizing service delivery and transparency, the website becomes a trusted and reliable primary source of information for the community.
Improving Transparency and Content Governance
With dozens of departments contributing content, governance complexity was one of the most significant operational challenges. The rebuild clarified Web Steward roles, formalized review and approval workflows, and implemented structured publishing permissions. These changes increased accountability, improved content accuracy and established a more sustainable lifecycle for ongoing updates across departments.
Additionally, the migration to a modern platform significantly enhanced security and information assurance. Advanced configurations, improved personally identifiable information controls, automated security patches, and more granular role-based permissions reduced vulnerabilities and strengthened overall site resilience. Security is now embedded within the platform architecture and administrative workflows.
Infrastructure Behind the Experience
Built on WordPress, the platform balances front-end simplicity with sophisticated administrative architecture. While the resident experience is streamlined and intuitive, the backend includes complex role management, multi-department workflows, structured approval chains and governance controls designed to support the operational realities of a municipal government. The implementation demonstrates how WordPress can be strategically architected to support enterprise-level complexity while maintaining usability and flexibility.
A Modern Civic Platform Built to Serve
The new City of Tacoma website represents a structural shift toward service-oriented government online. By aligning user needs with governance clarity, accessibility standards and enhanced security, the City now has a scalable digital foundation that supports transparency, engagement and long-term operational stability.
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