Austin Redistricting and Voter Participation Initiative
Challenge
Austin, Texas, is a city that continues to change and thrive. To best represent the people of the city, a diverse group of Austin residents will redraw the boundaries of the ten council districts. This represents a major change that will affect the city for years to come. The City of Austin needed a website to promote the process, so they contacted us. The website needed to fulfill many important purposes: inform the public in multiple languages, recruit qualified applicants, comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and be easily updated.
Solution
The Art of Engaging Voters “The final site covers everything a voter needs to know.” One of the biggest challenges faced by any city or political campaign is engaging voters. Fortunately, our agency specializes in clear and effective communication. Our team worked with city officials to craft a message both informative and easily understood. We took a complex process and made it accessible to everyone. The final site covers everything a voter needs to know about the redistricting process. To highlight the importance of the program, the website includes a helpful page entitled “Why This Matters.” We also created pages detailing the different committees involved, the project timeline, and answers to frequently asked questions. Best of all, every page encourages voters to participate in the process. Communicate in Multiple Languages with Accessibility Built In “Alex Wright Web Design and SEO knew what needed to be done.” Austin benefits from a diverse community, and they would not have it any other way. The variety of languages creates a special challenge when it comes to effective communication. To truly get the word out, the message needed to be available in English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, and Vietnamese. Alex Wright Web Design and SEO knew what needed to be done. To create a quality multilingual website, you need to do more than dump words into Google Translate. Not only is machine translation full of errors, but it will also hurt your search engine rank. Google and other search engines set a high standard for translated websites. That’s why our agency worked with professionals to translate and verify every piece of information. Users can easily switch to their preferred language with the menu bar. To get the best results, we added the appropriate backend modification, known as hreflang tags. These tags tell Google the website contains legitimate, valuable translations. Without the benefit of our team’s experience, the website might have been penalized by search engines. Instead, we delivered an engaging site that users can experience in the language of their choice. Creating a website that is accessible to all was a huge priority for the City of Austin. The website was designed along Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to meet the accessibility compliance of AA. Accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites that are equally available to people with disabilities and people using assistive website display technologies so that all people have equal access to the information on the website. The visual design of the website and the technical coding of the website was driven by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to increase the website’s overall accessibility. Recruit Volunteers Online Austin wanted a website that did more than inform; they need a way to actively recruit volunteers. For the redistricting process to take place, they need a panel of certified public accountants and a commission of citizens to redraw the district boundaries. To create the best possible team, Austin needs a large pool of qualified applicants. “When it comes to building this essential team of voters, Austin can point everyone to one website.” Our team used our tools and expertise to create simple-to-use applications for these important positions. To make it as easy as possible for the public to apply, the people of Austin can access these forms directly from the website. For the convenience of our clients, every piece of information submitted by applicants is easily accessible and simple to organize. When it comes to building this essential team of voters, Austin can point everyone to one website. Optimized and Easy to Update The finished website does everything our clients requested and looks fantastic on desktop computers, tablets, and even mobile phones. But there’s so much more to web design than crafting an attractive website. For a modern website to be truly effective, it needs to load quickly, show up on search engines, and meet modern accessibility requirements. Our expert designers and specialists in SEO (search engine optimization) built a site that runs smoothly and loads quickly. We achieved our goal of giving every user the best possible experience. Because situations can change in such a large and important campaign, our clients need a website that can be easily updated. We delivered a final product that can be accessed and changed as the need arises — including the translated pages. At Alex Wright, we believe in equipping our clients with the tools they need to be successful.
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