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CASE STUDY | 12 MINUTE READ

The City of Burbank Transformed Their Website to Reflect Their Modern Digital Identity

This Southern California city completely overhauled their website and reduced customer calls with their Liferay solution.
105,000+
Residents Served
15
Contributing Departments
256K
Page Views/Month
Outline
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Key Takeaways

  • Reduce customer calls with a self-service solution.
    Now that the City of Burbank’s new website has a great user experience with a clean, easily searchable interface, users can access needed information in just a few minutes or less, which became especially critical during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Decrease time-to-market with the right implementation team.
    With partners SSAI and UXDC on hand for the entire process, the City of Burbank was able to get the most out of Liferay while empowering the IT and content teams with the necessary knowledge to continue on their own.
  • Empower every user to be able to access your solution.
    The new website adheres to local and federal accessibility standards and uses responsive design to ensure that users can find what they need on the site from any device. 

Background

Located in the east part of San Fernando Valley in California, the City of Burbank is known as the “Media Capital of the World” for being home to more than 1,000 media and entertainment companies such as Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., and Netflix.
 
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Intranets
Self-Service Portals
Government

Challenges

The City of Burbank was not happy with their public website, which did not accurately represent the fast-paced, digital-forward identity of the city itself. The City had also recently launched an initiative called "Reimagine IT," which had a goal of "laying out a new path to significantly improve the digital services that we provide to the city," says Kevin Gray, CIO at the City of Burbank.

The City of Burbank’s IT team wanted to completely redesign the website because of these issues:
  1. Outdated look and feel. The website lacked a compelling modern design that wasn’t up-to-date with current standards or the City of Burbank’s new branding.
  2. Difficult editing process. Content creators had to deal with frustrating workarounds just to display content on the website, wasting unnecessary time and resources.
  3. Unsatisfactory user experience. Not only was the website not responsive, it also didn’t meet accessibility standards and was hard to navigate, with long unbroken sections of texts and links.
Liferay’s out-of-the-box capabilities provided nearly all the features required to support the city.
Cornell Lewis, Project Manager
SSAI

Implementation

The City of Burbank conducted a thorough investigation on potential new platforms with budgetary considerations in mind, ultimately choosing Liferay DXP because of their ability to "serve all of our primary portal needs for our citizen digital experiences," says Gray. The City worked with SSAI, a member of the Liferay Partner Network, and boutique digital agency UX Design Collective (UXDC) for the planning, implementation, and validation phases.

With SSAI and UXDC to help bring the new vision to life, the City of Burbank’s IT team was able to use the switch to Liferay as an opportunity to rethink their overall content and design strategies, ultimately applying a user-first approach that eliminated unnecessary information and prioritized easy searching.

SSAI, UXDC, Liferay, and the city’s IT team were also able to identify when out-of-the-box capabilities could be configured to meet the city’s needs, and where additional customizations were required.
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Results

The City of Burbank now has a website that accurately reflects their status as the media capital of the world. The new website brings together news, information, and events from fifteen and counting city departments including the City Attorney’s office, Community Development, Parks & Recreation, and more. 

Not only is content created and published independently among the different city departments, but it also gets presented in a unified way on the website under one search experience. Liferay’s page templates and fragments allow content managers to update content easily and immediately, ensuring site consistency.

Through the new website, the City of Burbank experiences:
  1. Decreased calls to city departments. Now that the site’s appearance and performance have improved, citizens can self-service, enabling city employees to focus on critical work.
  2.  Great feedback from users. The site’s streamlined and modern design helps users find what they’re looking for easily and quickly, and users have been thrilled with the outcome.
  3. Increased citizen reach. Users can access the website from any device, and accessibility compliance means the City of Burbank can reach all their citizens.
Continuing to strategize how to step into the future and prioritize serving residents and local businesses, the City of Burbank will soon upgrade to the newest version of Liferay. "This [project] has been really a watershed accomplishment for us," says Gray, "and it's leading us into a whole new era of transformation and improvement."