Oaklandca.gov Relaunches!

Published on June 25, 2025

Frank H. Ogawa Plaza
Oakland, CA – The City of Oakland will launch Thursday morning an upgrade of its official website, oaklandca.gov, implementing significant improvements in how our community finds and accesses City services online. The upgrade supports improved mobile device usability for the website, and simplifies content to make it easier to search.
 
This strategy is built on understanding how Oaklanders use the website: most people visit from a mobile device, and most prefer to search for their content directly rather than navigating through multiple pages.
 
Our goal is to get visitors in and out of the site having found what they need swiftly and successfully, regardless of their vision ability or preferred language. Oaklandca.gov focuses on delivering services at the click of a button, no matter what department is responsible for that service.
 
The new Oaklandca.gov will be launched, but not finished. We are using web analytics to test what’s working, find out what isn’t, and make changes along the way in real time. At the bottom of every page on the site is a link to send us website feedback so community members can send their questions, comments, or concerns. We’ll be reviewing that feedback daily to improve the site continuously. Okay, so what’s different?

 

What You Can See

There are some obvious visual distinctions between our old and new sites.

 
  • Updated Site Navigation: Analysis of how visitors were using our site indicated that some of the most-used City services were too hard to find on the previous site design. The most used City service categories are now elevated through a new website main navigation.
  • Search: Data also showed that many visitors were not finding what they were looking for through the website’s previous search functions. The back-end programming of the new site has been updated to provide more relevant content honed to a visitor’s searches to get visitors to the right content faster.
  • Updated, Streamlined Content: We were told by community visitors and employee website users alike that the old site had too much outdated or irrelevant content. We went through a thorough process to trim outdated or obsolete content out of the site and make sure what remains on the site is current, accurate, and relevant.
  • Readability: Too many older pages were written in bureaucratic language that was harder than necessary to understand – and also harder for automated tools to translate into non-English languages. We’ve simplified language on many pages and trained our staff on how to better translate information on topics requiring their expertise into more everyday language.

Behind the scenes, City employees are our power users and the new site supports them with better management of content for fresh, accurate information.

The site changeover is scheduled for early morning on Thursday, June 26, and the site will be unavailable to visitor traffic for a short period that morning. It is anticipated the shift will be completed by 9:00am. To see the upgraded site, visit www.oaklandca.gov any time after that. 

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