County's new website wins international gold award.
County's new website wins international gold award.

New County Website Wins Gold MarCom Award

Author: County Administrative Office
Date: 10/27/2017 2:23 PM

The County received international recognition this week for its new website.


The County announced today that its website has earned gold in the MarCom Awards competition, an annual international communications competition that receives about 6,000 entries each year. It’s 2016 Annual Report also earned an honorable mention.  

A partial winners list on the MarCom Awards website today shows that the County is among just two U.S. counties and a dozen other government entries to earn a Gold Award in the website category. All winners will be posted to the MarCom website on Nov. 1.

“This award reflects the hard work County employees put into our website and the valuable input community members provided before the new website went live to the public,” said County Communications Analyst Whitney Szentesi. “Overall, the community response has been very positive, but we’re not done yet. We are continually working to improve the new website. Our goal is to make it an invaluable resource to the public we serve.”

More than 100 County employees contributed to the project and hundreds of members of the public submitted photos for the County’s website, which went live in July. It was the first major design overhaul of the website in 10 years. The new website was designed by iiiDesign, a local marketing, web and graphic design studio.

The County's website contains more than 2,700 webpages, including pages with details about the County’s 750 public services, and more than 6,500 files and documents. An archived version of the old website can still be found, however, via a link in the footer of the new site.

“This is very exciting news,” said County Project Manager Susan Pittaway, who was integral to the project’s success. “The new website project is a great example of what we can accomplish if we all work together.”

The MarCom Awards competition receives about 6,000 entries from dozens of countries around the world each year. It honors excellence in marketing and communication while recognizing the creativity, hard work and generosity of industry professionals. MarCom is administered by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, an international organization that was founded in 1995 and consists of several thousand marketing and design professionals. 

Entries are judged at random and all work is evaluated solely on its own quality, creativity and resourcefulness. Because there is no lengthy essay accompanying the entry, judges base their decisions on learned perceptions of creative excellence rather than an entrant’s imaginative explanation of an entry’s value.