THE CORPORATION OF THE TOWN OF THE BLUE MOUNTAINS REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL FOR WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
2015-13-P-ADM
SCOPE OF WORK
1. Background
The Town of The Blue Mountains (hereafter known as the “Town”) is located on the shores of Georgian Bay in Grey County. The majority of all administration functions occur within the Town Hall at 32 Mill Street, Thornbury, Ontario.
There are approximately 7,000 residences with 6,500 full-time and about 6,000 part-time residents in this vibrant and growing community. We have an active tourism and agricultural base to our economy. Our citizens tend to be very engaged, with high service expectations.
Town Council and staff work to balance the needs of residents, businesses and visitors to the area. Our focus is on efficient and effective delivery of service to all of these customer groups.
The Town website is one of the primary means of communication used to convey news and information to the Town residents and businesses about our operations. Both residents and businesses count on the website to be accurate and up to date, with information that is easy to find and access.
The Town seeks to retain the services of a qualified individual or firm who will work with Town Council, Staff and the Community to help redesign and redevelop our website, supporting our need to communicate with residents, visitors and businesses in a clear, easy to navigate manner. We are looking for a firm with extensive municipal website development experience. The vendor selected will work with the Town’s website user group to redesign the site, develop the new site and support the implementation of the new site with training and knowledge transfer.
There are several factors driving the need to update our website: 1. Increased mobile use.
2. AODA Compliance.
3. The need to add features.
2. Website Objectives
The objective of the website redesign is to enable residents, visitors, businesses and those considering a move to The Town of The Blue Mountains, timely access to up-to date, easy to understand information on demand from mobile or other platforms, and shareable through the major social media channels.
The Town is looking for creative ideas in the approach to our website design while meeting our functional requirements Proponents are encouraged to look beyond the scope of work and offer new and innovative approaches. Explain the reasoning for these recommendations as part of the proposal.
The website is primarily an information tool. However, it will also be a marketing vehicle for the Town, designed to attract both businesses and residents to the Town, so a pleasing visual aspect in line with our current branding will be important.
As part of our “branding”, we aim to be accessible, transparent and customer service focused. Therefore, information on the website must be easily accessed through intuitive menu design as well as “3 click” access via A to Z listings (or similar), and an effective internal search tool. The site should be designed to be AODA compliant to ensure effective navigation by all residents.
Information will be posted to the site by a variety of staff members in each department requiring an easy to use, intuitive content management system for most website functions (based on their “administrative” level in the system).
The Town also aims to provide staff with a forum for accessing employee information such as Human Resources policies, pension and benefit information through an enhanced intranet. Currently our intranet, which can only be accessed, viewed and edited through a staff login, allows individuals to post items under a variety of headings, but functionality is limited. An enhanced intranet will be an important feature of any new site design.
The website must run without a full-time webmaster. The Towns goal is to create a site that requires minimal external maintenance. However, as new functionality becomes available and our needs change, we would like to discuss what an ongoing
service/upgrade/technical support package would look like and cost on an annual basis. 3. Desired Functionality Enhancements
Our goal is to enhance the entire site, from design through development to
implementation. We will require the information currently present on our website to continue to have a presence on the new/updated site. However, we require significantly enhanced navigational capability.
consider and propose alternative solutions, recommendations and improvements.
While all items should be included in the price of the proposal, the starred (*) items should be priced in a separate modular fashion to allow for scaling up/down of the total proposal costs based on the budget available for this project:
1. Add E-commerce functionality to allow individuals to pay for seminars, training, facility booking fees, etc. online using credit card or debit payments in a secure format. *
2. Add a facility booking tool to allow for the booking of facilities, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, ice time and other items as may be added in the future. This tool should have a robust set of features including, but not limited to: allowing pictures to be posted; a full description of the facility and 360 virtual tours. The tool should also allow individuals to browse through multiple facilities to find availability on a calendar basis and have links to the online payment system and integrated rental contract approvals. *
3. An events calendar that is managed in-house (our current system is
maintained by a third party) allowing members of the public to add events in the Town.
4. A business directory that is managed in-house allowing businesses to add their name to the listing.
5. A staff directory.
6. The ability to transmit RSS feeds for news items, events and other notices for use in mobile applications.
7. The ability to use third party mapping e.g. County of Grey, Google maps, internal Town ESRI mapping server, etc. on the website.
8. An effective, flexible Bids and Tenders capability. The site must maintain a registered bidders list electronically, with a simple method for staff to pick up the list from the site. The system should also include the ability for the set-up of user accounts, large document uploads, flexibility in the number of documents that can be associated with each bid opportunity, email to registered bidders and the ability to post information on multiple bid related factors.
9. The ability to post and/or update a document in multiple locations on the site to ensure effective version control.
10. A documents library, with a separate searchable By-law section including the ability to sort by By-law number, date, etc.
11. A simple method for linking/embedding to internal databases such as the CityView online portal.
The website should allow the Town to continue to manage a large amount of technical information and present it in a user friendly (often visual) format that is interesting and easy to navigate.
4. Other Considerations for Website Design
existing website that should be addressed in the proposal:
1. The website should have a consistent and standardized format and graphic look for all of the pages, thereby establishing a unified theme throughout the Town’s website. However, the established theme should also provide the
flexibility to allow some level of individuality and/or functionality between Town functions and departments. Examples of a standardized format that allows for “personalization” will be important to include as appendices.
2. The updated intranet site must be password protected and hosted in the Town’s internal network. The intranet can be visually distinct from the website, but should include a robust set of functions.
Our Content Management System currently allows the Town to send e-blasts, news items and newsletters. This functionality should be maintained. Bids and tenders are also sent out through the control panel, although the Town is open to recommendations that improve functionality.
3. For ease of use, the Town’s website must provide consistent orientation and navigational aids, e.g. including a homepage link or icon on each page in the same position (or similar).
4. A regular notification system to alert staff users to potentially outdated content.
5. A notification system to alert staff users to potentially non-AODA compliant content.
Please provide any software that would be used to create the site including all graphics software and recommend software and licenses that the Town may need to purchase for continued maintenance of the website.
5. Technical Requirements
1. Being a rural area, our site must be accessible on a wide range of bandwidths for both mobile and home users.
2. Mobile accessibility must include Blackberry, Android, Apple and Windows. Please describe the recommended approach(es) to mobile technology and display.
3. The proposal should clearly highlight programming languages and version, as well as identifying database platform and version.
4. The website must work on major browsers (FireFox, Chrome, Safari, IE) and be updated as required to ensure that support is provided for multiple versions of each browser.
5. Coding and applications must meet and validate in W3C standards for HTML, CSS and dynamic programming.
with the audit and any remedies resulting from the audit shall be incurred at the successful bidder’s expense and should be included as part of the website proposal.
7. Must comply with the Federal Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Must also comply with the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act
(MFIPPA).
8. The site is to be built with security certificates for the public side to access via https to protect users. Coding must include measures to prevent SQL injection and cross scripting vulnerabilities. Online forms need to include anti-spam security measures such as a captcha or other validation. Any email addresses included in content or on contact lists must be protected from spam harvesting. Please provide details on the hosting environment – server type, uptime, monitoring, security, redundancies and disaster recovery. Additional details on frequency of updates to the hosting environment and the ability of IT to control this function should be
included as should information on how downtime will be handled and communicated. Backups must be performed daily on the site and maintained for at least one month. IT staff must be able to download backups for facility booking, business directory and event listings in a view and print format.
A Service Level Agreement must be provided to cover hosting service metrics such as uptime, scheduled downtime, speed, etc. as well as the cost of hosting fees. Please attach a sample Service Level Agreement.
6. Support Requirements
Please provide a separate quote for a package of support that includes at a minimum: 1. Training for staff on use of the Content Management System (about 10 to 15
staff).
2. Training for department staff on specific enhanced functionality (e.g. payment system, online booking system)
3. Training for IT staff on the hosting side including backups, monitoring of site, restarting site, etc.
4. Technical support for regular business hours Monday to Friday, with optional pricing for 24/7 technical support.
5. Web hosting, preferably Canadian. 7. Additional Proposal Requirements: The proposal must include:
1. A comprehensive outline of the process and the plan to work with Town Staff during the design, development and implementation phases.
phases. The selected firm's representatives will be required to meet regularly with the Town’s project manager and/or representatives to discuss and plan the project(s) and provide progress reports as needed.
3. The cost of attending all staff meetings, including presentations to Council and Senior Management. Include in-person meetings, Council meetings and
conference calls as part of the project plan breakdown.
4. Standard contract wording with respect to licenses for the use of the code. 5. A testing period and subsequent acceptance testing period, either period not to
