Falls Church city leaders are working to update a government website that they acknowledge has fallen behind the times.
Poor functionality on mobile devices, broken links and outdated information and contacts currently plague the website, according to Joshua Surprenant, who joined the communications staff in April and has been tasked with dissecting the site’s strengths and weaknesses.
“The reason we got so out of control was there wasn’t a strategy, there wasn’t a web manager,” said Mary Catherine Chase, the city’s communications director, during a Sept. 24 meeting of Falls Church’s government-operations committee.
Surprenant and other staff began the website-redesign effort in July. Later this month, he is hoping to get approval for a new design, to be created in time for a spring 2026 launch.
To date, staff has fixed more than 400 broken links. They’re working on improving search-engine optimization and have tried to update pages to make navigation easier.
“You [sometimes] have to go four or five layers deep to get to the actual information,” Surprenant said of the user experience. “Even taking [away] one click can help people.”
Another issue is draft content that lives on in the system after it should have been removed.
After the redesign is launched, it will take daily tender, loving care to keep the site performing as it should.
“This is like a never-ending, ongoing thing,” Surprenant said. “This is a first step.”
The website’s functionality drew complaints from candidates for Council during a recent campaign forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Village Preservation and Improvement Society. At the government-operations meeting, Mayor Letty Hardi said she hoped to focus on addressing portions of the site that see the most traffic.
“Let’s fix them and make them better,” she said, urging staff to ensure “we don’t end up in this place” again.
Arlington recently launched an artificial-intelligence-based, interactive communication tool named “AVA” on its website. Falls Church officials see value in AI, but do not think the city’s website is ready for it.
“We have to clean everything first so that it’s good data,” Chase said.
The public “will not return and use it unless they find it trustworthy,” she said.
