The Cart Before the Horse
When Alaska state agencies or boroughs decide they need a new website, the instinct is to immediately draft an RFP focusing on visual design and the choice of Content Management System. This is a mistake.
The primary cause of budget overruns and delayed launches in public sector web projects is a failure to define the Information Architecture (IA) and content migration strategy beforehand.
The Cost of Sprawling Content
Over a decade, a municipal site can accumulate thousands of orphaned pages, outdated resolutions, and redundant navigation menus. If you don’t audit this before hiring an agency, you end up paying premium rates for a vendor to migrate garbage into a new system.
The Pre-RFP Checklist
Before publishing your solicitation on the state procurement portal, complete this internal exercise:
- Run a Content Inventory: Use a crawling tool to generate a complete URL list. Identify what must stay, what must be archived, and what can be deleted.
- Define Audience Tasks, Not Internal Org Charts: Citizens don’t care about your internal department structure. They care about tasks: “Pay a Ticket,” “Find a Meeting Agenda,” “Report a Pothole.” Your top-level navigation must reflect these tasks.
- Establish an Accessibility Baseline: Explicitly state in your RFP that the vendor must meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards and outline how they will prove compliance during User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
By defining these parameters first, you ensure you attract highly qualified, engineering-focused vendors rather than superficial design shops.