Las Vegas unveils redesigned website that’s easier to use

In Vegas, even the government website gets a face-lift.

City officials unveiled a newly redesigned lasvegasnevada.gov Monday afternoon, after hyping a “big announcement” over the city’s Twitter account last week.

Doing away with the old pale-blue and white scheme, the new design takes on the city’s iconic imagery, with fuchsia and purple banners and a smiling showgirl.

“We didn’t want this to look like a typical, government website,” City Manager Betsy Fretwell said in a news release. “We wanted to be exciting, progressive and on trend, more like what you see in the private sector. Just because we’re government doesn’t mean we have to be boring.”

Las Vegas paid local Web design company Adlava $41,475 to design the site, and $420,768 to site builder 3Di Systems to create the actual website.

The site, which gets about 10,000 hits a day, was in dire need of a renovation, city officials said. Spokeswoman Diana Paul said the city had been using the same template for more than a decade.

In digital years, it was ancient.

“The website was difficult to navigate and after looking over the analytics data, we made significant modifications to the layouts to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for,”Adlava CEO Nick Kaptain said in the release. “We knew the website needed to be packaged more intuitively for the user, as well as presented aesthetically to appeal to people of all ages that make up this community.”

On the front page, users can find where to pay their sewer bills, a list of upcoming shows and can quickly report a problem or file a claim with the city among numerous other links. From the top banner, people can easily navigate to pages that list current road construction, or even a “newcomer’s guide,” which has links to essential utility sites such as NV Energy, Southwest Gas, Republic Services and the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

But it’s not just for locals. The homepage includes links to visitor’s guides, such as the city’s “Downtown Visitors Guide” and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority guide, on the home page, and highlights some of the area’s popular tourist attractions such as Hoover Dam, Fremont Street Experience and the Mob Museum.

Contact Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4638. Follow @ColtonLochhead on Twitter.