Michelle Bird, Public Affairs Manager
Larimer County’s web team was recognized today by the Board of Larimer County Commissioners for receiving not one, two or three — but four prestigious awards in 2018 for excellence in digital communication — the Saavy Digital Interactive Award, Pinnacle Award, Member’s Choice Award, and Governmental Experience Award.
The Saavy Award was presented to Larimer County at the recent City-County Communications and Marketing [3CMA] conference in Milwaukee for the complete redesign of the county website www.larimer.org, winning first place for large counties and cities. The combination of branding, photography, ease of navigation, interactive tools and enhanced search functions greatly increased satisfaction from citizens conducting business with Larimer County.
The Pinnacle Award and Members Choice awards from the National Association of Government Web Professionals [NAGW] went to Larimer County as well, for best practices that improve how citizens get their information online and conduct business. The award recognizes Larimer County nationally in the large county category for web design, content, organization, performance, open data, and accessibility standards. Larimer County was also chosen for the prestigious Members Choice Award, an honor for being judged by peer web developers across the nation as having one of the best-designed websites.
The Government Experience Award 4th place also went to Larimer County for the redesign of the county website. The award distinguishes Larimer County for radically improving the way services and information is delivered to citizens. Larimer County was unique in this category since it is the only small county under 500,000 with the other four counties in the group having large populations of 1.5 million people or more.
Receiving this award was Larimer County Webmaster Gregg Turnbull, who recently completed his Certified Government Digital Services Professional Certificate.
“Along with my amazing team of Jim Vogl, Allen Masters, Michelle Bird, and the IT department, we rebuilt and launched larimer.org serving 330,000-plus citizens. The new website is mobile-friendly, fast, and designed to cater to the citizen first. We’ve focused on making more county data available with data-driven dashboards and other elements,” said Turnbull.
Larimer County Commissioner Tom Donnelly agreed the improvements to the website have been beneficial for citizens. “We came from something good and you all have made it even better,” said Donnelly.
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Getting recognition for the work the team did on redesigning Larimer County website is a great boost in moral, and because they made the website easier to navigate the public as a whole also benefits. Sometimes government websites are full of very helpful information but they lack the navigation friendly layout, which is often why the public more often than not complains about.