The 18-month journey of creating the new City of Marion website ends today.
Marion Design Co., an organization founded by Indiana Wesleyan University professors, partnered with the city in April 2016 to give the government website a facelift. The goal was to not only redesign the website, but create a new first impression for the City of Marion for newcomers.
Luke Anspach provided a preview for the new web page on Wednesday morning. He explained the nearly two-year process of creating the website, which some designers admitted they thought it might never end.
“A lot of time, we tend to think that a website or a design just kinda comes out of thin air,” Anspach said, “but there’s actually a lot of investment, a lot of process, a lot of research, a lot of effort that does into the process.”
Designers and IWU professors Wendy Puffer and Herb Peterson with Luke Anspach and other IWU student interns began assessing over 30 websites of cities that shared similarities with Marion. Whether that was in size, economic demographics or simply being in the Midwestern region, Anspach said they found that they had their work cut out for them.
“To be honest, the site that we have currently lacked compared to the rest of them significantly, so we knew that we have a good chance of improvement from that point,” Anspach said.
After assessment, designers dove into the rebranding process for the website. Designing and coding the website to make a user-friendly page that is modern and easy to use for local government was a time-consuming challenge for the designers.
In the last leg of the journey, Marion Design Co. received a grant from the Community Foundation of Grant County to complete their work. The $6,000 grant allowed them to finalize a product that is sustainable and lends itself to modifications so it may function for years to come.
The website has a simple design that will allow users to access government meeting agendas, minutes, contacts for local officials, as well as information for tourism, investment and featured stories of residents in Marion.
Allumbaugh said he was proud of the work volunteers at Marion Design Co. were able to accomplish, and he believes that partnerships like the one Marion Design Co. has with the City of Marion is the future of government.
“(They’ve) raised the bar for our city,” Allumbaugh said. “This is the new way government is going to work. They’re going to have to partner with entities to be stronger, and I think by doing that those other organizations will get stronger as well.”
Marion Design Co. warned that the perfect website is not instantaneous. Peterson explained that the web address “takes time to update and reach all IP addresses, so don’t worry if your neighbor has the new website and you don’t.”
Peterson said the process, though it was long, was a labor of love for Marion.