Main Website Sections

The website is broken down into several main sections, each of which are listed in the gray horizontal navigation bar.

Each of these pages is designed to pull in content from all over the website in an attempt to help people find what they are looking for. We often suggest content based on page metadata.

Home Page

When people hit the home page we don’t know much about what they are looking for. Because of this, we have to be rather general about our suggestions.

Featured Stories

The first section on the page is Featured Stories. The goals here are to:

• Help citizens discover services that they may not be aware of
• Highlight service changes
• Promote St. Louis successes

Top Requests

Next are the six most active pages on the site. Since these pages are the most popular, a large portion of visitors are taken care of by just choosing from this list. 

The top requests are monitored and updated periodically.

Living in St. Louis

Living in St. Louis has three links designed to help residents and people relocating to the City. The first link changes based on what's happening this time of year. The other two change less often.

Calendar Sections

Finally we have a preview of what’s coming up on the website’s Public Meetings and Community Events calendars.

Each time a department adds something to its calendar, it also shows up in the site-wide calendar. The public is also allowed to submit events, but those have to be reviewed and approved before they show up on the website.

Learn how to add meetings and events.

All City Services

The next section, All City Services, is for browsing through the website’s pages by topic.

Each page on the site can be tagged with a specific topic in its metadata. Clicking on one of the topics gives you a list of sub-topics, and clicking on a sub-topic gives you a list of related pages. These pages are organized by their content type (things like Services, Maps and GIS, Plans and Reports, etc). 

Browsing by topic is helpful for people who don’t know which department is responsible for whatever it is they are looking for.

Services By Audience

The Services By Audience section is very similar to Choose a Topic.

Each page on the website is tagged with an audience in its metadata, which is the group of people that the page’s content was written for. Clicking on one of the eight audiences shows a list of all pages that have been tagged with that audience.

These lists are very broad, and could be overwhelming.

Services

Most, if not all, departments do some kind of transaction with people and/or businesses.

These transactions don’t have to involve money, but they all involve some kind of exchange. People come asking for a service, give us some information/money, and we provide them with something in return.

To help these transactions go smoothly, we create service pages for each of these transactions. 

These pages provide:

• A basic explanation of the service
• Preparation steps  
• Instructions on how to do get the service
• What to expect afterwards 

Each time a page is created with a metadata Content Type of “A-Z Service Page” a link to it automatically shows up in this section. Services can be browsed by name, topic, and audience.

Learn how to create a service page.

The services homepage also provides information about changes in service (like trash schedule changes) and allows people to browse by topic or audience.