Extreme Makeover: County Website Edition

We’re showing a fresh face to the world today. The County’s website has a new look and some new features to make it more useful to the people we serve.

First off – the address. We’re now using SanDiegoCounty.gov and have built that in as the title on the site. The address the County has long used, sdcounty.ca.gov, will still work, so there’s no immediate need to change any links or bookmarks out there. But the new name should be easier for the public to remember. And SanDiegoCounty.gov applies only to the website. Email addresses are staying as they are.

The biggest change is that the site was designed to display much better on smartphones. The sections of a page will resize and re-stack to fit the screen, with a lot less pinching and zooming. If you look at the site on your desktop then your phone, you’ll see the menu collapses into a single button. Getting everything on the site to adjust smoothly from desktop to phone will take continued effort, but we’re in much better shape to reach customers where they now expect to get things done: on their mobile devices. 

One of the most important tools on any website is the search, and we've made a couple improvements to ours. If you start typing something in the search box, after a few letters you'll see it give a few suggestions of most common results. There’s also some work on the back end that will match specific pages to certain phrases, making much better search results. These features should also continue to get better with time.    

From the County's home page, you'll see a new addition to the site, a section called SDCountyInFocus. It compiles in one location reports, maps, look-up tools, facts and figures on the gamut of County services and activities.

Those are a few of the highlights. There’s still a little work going on in the transition, so – pardon our dust, so to speak, if you come across any. But welcome to the new SanDiegoCounty.gov.