Website Changes Make It Easier to Explore MRSC Topics

MRSC’s website contains a huge amount of information pertaining to local governments in Washington State, from big topics like public meetings, public records, and procurement down to less prominent (but still important) issues like surplus property, nonconforming uses, and utility billing. It’s a fun challenge for us not only to keep the information up-to-date, but also to make it as easy as possible for you to find.

Four years ago, we launched a new website search system which made it much easier to search for information using specific keywords. However, sometimes you might prefer to browse information and see everything we’ve got related to a particular topic, and we know from our customer satisfaction surveys that some of you have found browsing difficult.

So to improve the browsing experience, we’ve just launched a complete overhaul of our Explore Topics section — as well as making some other website upgrades while we were at it. Here are some of the highlights.

Main Navigation Menu is Now Clickable

The first change you’ll probably notice is that on our main navigation menu, the hover feature is gone. Instead, you must click to reveal the drop-down menu. This provides important accessibility benefits, as well as eliminating those annoying situations where your cursor accidentally drifts off the menu and causes the menu to disappear.

If you're still seeing the hover feature, it's because your web browser cache files haven't refreshed yet. You can either clear your browser cache, or just wait a little while for your browser to catch up.

New Explore Topics Options

The heart of our website is the Explore Topics section, which contains roughly 360 webpages on a wide variety of topics. (We call them, rather creatively, “topic pages”…)

Previously, our topic pages were organized into 12 very high-level categories — things like Finance, Governance, Legal, Management, and Public Safety. We eventually added a “popular topics” list to make it easier to access webpages related to public records, open public meetings, procurement, and more, but it could still be a challenge to know where to find certain topics.

Now, we’ve completely re-done the categories from scratch. Some of the categories are mostly the same — “Finance” is now Finance & Budgeting, “Planning” is now Planning & Growth Management, and “Public Safety” is… well, Public Safety.

But gone are topics like “Legal,” “Governance,” and “Management,” which are so broad they’re hardly useful. Instead, we’ve replaced them with more focused and descriptive options like:

• Community Engagement
• Court Decisions & Attorney General Opinions
• Elected & Appointed Officials
• Housing & Homelessness
• Public Meetings & OPMA
• Public Records & PRA
• Procurement & Public Works
• Utilities & Telecommunications
• And more!

You can see the whole list by clicking on Explore Topics at the top of this page.

Browse All Topic Pages A-Z

Not sure where to look? Or maybe you just want to see everything we have? Check out our new View All Topic Pages A-Z option, which shows every single topic page in alphabetical order. (It doesn’t include other resources like MRSC Insight blog posts, which are always changing as we publish two new posts every week.)

Just click on the letter of the alphabet at the top, or you can try “Ctrl-F” or “Command-F” to search for a specific keyword. Whenever we add or remove a topic page, this list will automatically be updated, so you can be sure it has the latest information.

We have a lot of topic pages, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Better Printability

Have you tried printing one of our webpages over the past year and gotten extra things you didn’t need on the printout, like the search bar or website menus? Well, we’ve fixed that so you should get just the information you need, such as the page title, content, date of printing, and URL address. Speaking of which…

Updated and Simplified URLs

Many of our topic pages now have new URL addresses, either because they were moved to a new location and/or because the URLs were too long and unwieldy and we wanted to simplify them. Your old links should still work — and some of the URLs haven’t changed at all — but even so, I'd encourage you to review and update any bookmarks.

For instance, below are a couple of the more egregious examples. If you click on the old URLs, you'll notice the links still work and automatically redirect you to the new URLs — but again, best to use the new URLs moving forward.

New Website Footer

Our old website footer left a lot to be desired, so we’ve now revamped it to highlight MRSC’s services and staff, as well as to make it easier to find some of our key resources (including some of the ones I’ve mentioned here). You can check it out below.

Accessibility Improvements

We also made a number of other website changes, such as accessibility improvements for people with visual impairments. Some of you may never notice these changes, but our goal is to serve all of our local government customers, and these changes will make it easier for us to do so.

Try it Out!

Take a look at our Explore Topics section to browse by topic area, or try viewing all topic pages A-Z.

Have other ideas for how MRSC can better serve you? Please contact us. Your feedback is invaluable and helps us improve our local government services now and into the future.