Setting a new bar for a city website
Intro
The goal of Liepaja's municipality was to create an accessible website to everyone by providing information about government services in a comprehensible way. It was crucial to establish a new and up-to-date dialogue between residents and the city.
Story
The usual problem with larger institutions is that they see information only from their perspective. Too often we notice that website menus resemble department structures. We did not want to make this mistake, so we decided to go out and meet the citizens of Liepaja with the goal to organize the website information in a meaningful way - which would be understandable not only to the people working at the government. Our goal was to remove barriers that prevent interaction or access to the website. We took special care of people with disabilities.
Context
The creative challenge was to introduce aesthetics and city mood in the design, without losing focus on the primary goal - functionality and accessibility, in terms of both content and technology. And the received Latvian Design Award 2018 for this project tells us that we did something right. Today we can see that the new concept and approach to Liepaja.lv has been recognised as a new benchmark for city council websites in Latvia.