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City previews redesigned website and council dashboard; launch set for January 2026
Summary
Communications and the Office of Performance Management showed a WordPress-based site built to WCAG 2.1 AA standards, new branding and a dashboard that ties council goals to real-time metrics; staff set user testing for December and a public launch in January 2026.
Renee Mitchell, communications and engagement officer, and web staff presented a near-final redesign of the City of Bend website and a preview of a new council dashboard, saying the site will replace the city’s current Granicus Vision platform with WordPress and modern accessibility features. “We’re redesigning the website, looking at the community needs at the forefront of the design process,” Mitchell said, adding the site will meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA standards.
Staff proposed the site as human-centered and transactional: easier search, clearer service-driven navigation, forms and payment tools, and language translation via Weglot. Jacob Riggle, the city’s user-experience designer, demonstrated page mockups that emphasize larger photography, fewer “walls of text,” anchored left-column navigation on long pages and a prominent site search. Carrie Dodd, web and graphics coordinator, said content refactoring has reduced the site’s pages from more than 1,000 to under 800 and that content will be rewritten to a lower reading level.
Mitchell said the new site will be “mobile first,” and reported the current site receives about 1.6 million page views a year (roughly 4,000 a day). She said the city will move to Weglot for improved translations and will test accessibility with local advocates and screen-reader users before launch.
Jesse (Office of Performance Management) previewed the council dashboard that will display the metrics council adopted during goal-setting. The dashboard is designed to be metric-first (rather than action-item-first), include mobile-friendly card views and link to data hubs (housing, transportation, public safety) where historical, nightly-updated data can be explored. Staff said some metrics are calculated on a fiscal biennium and others on calendar-year data feeds; updates will be automated where possible.
Councilors and staff discussed language access, screen-reader testing, and a December user-testing period before publication. Staff set a soft public launch date of January 2026 and said they will invite councilors and community testers to pre-launch user-testing in December.
