The city of Renton launched a new website this year with the goal of creating a better user experience.

The website change was first proposed as a budget item in 2022, and the city began working on it in 2024. The city launched it in January 2025.

At the April 28 Committee of the Whole meeting, Renton communications and engagement director Laura Pettitt said the previous supplier had transitioned from municipal websites to providing mostly school websites, and customer support was ending.

“It really became a time to review what we needed from a website and review what was happening across the landscape to see where we can make improvements,” Pettitt said.

Pettitt said they found the system they were using to edit the website was “clunky and painful” for staff. Therefore, the communications team was left in charge of making changes to the site, creating a bottleneck. She said they also found many pages with outdated information and more than 100 pages that hadn’t been visited at all in the past year.

“That told us there was an extraneous amount of waste,” Pettitt said. “Really what we wanted to do is make sure we have a good product. That’s our digital lobby really. It’s our city hall online.”

Pettitt said they realized their website was focused on their organization chart which doesn’t make as much sense for a resident. To make the experience better for the user, Pettitt said they wanted to make their most frequently-visited websites easier to access.

“You’re not going to know what’s nested under executive services or public works if you are just trying to get your dog license,” Pettitt said. “Our goal is no more than three clicks. We found there is a big drop off that happens the more clicks you have to go through.”

The new website reduces the number of pages from 900 to 400, Pettitt said. She said one of the ways they reduced pages was bringing several pages together under one title, which made the information easier to find.

Pettitt said one of the main reasons they chose Granicus as the provider is the back-end organization system.

“It’s like taking three office floors of file folders and putting them into a lovely designed file cabinet, color-coded and organized well so everyone can find information,” Pettitt said. “It’s really much easier for all of our staff to find information and to make sure there aren’t outdated links or information.”

Pettitt said the website now integrates better with Your Voice Renton, GovDelivery and GovQA than it had before.

Pettitt said their response to questions and feedback is ongoing. She said if people have any questions or concerns about the website, they can email communications@rentonwa.gov and expect an almost immediate response. She also said they plan to have a six-month assessment in July where they will have a survey for both city staff and users.