City’s Web Site is Redesigned for First Time in a Decade

NYC.gov was established in 2000, when Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor, the city’s 311 services line did not exist and the first iPhone was seven years from distracting anybody. NYC.gov had plenty of text, an unglamorous warren of drop-down menus and a clunky search engine. Yet after a series of decidedly smartphone-age steps, including creating its own cloud computing network, the city unveiled a new NYC.gov— the site’s first redesign since 2003.

The redesign has been planned since 2011, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg included it among other goals for the city’s digital future. The city held a hackathon, during which programmers and designers brainstormed new looks for the site. It hired a Brooklyn firm, Huge Inc., to create the final design. Many of the changes are based on data on what the site’s 35 million annual unique visitors tend to look for — most commonly, information on parking, transit, garbage collection and school opening