Release webinar
Get a quick rundown on all our new features with our release webinar below, or read on for a more detailed description.
Get your residents to where they need to go
Use top tasks in navigation to promote your site's main highways.
Did you know that only a portion of site traffic comes through a city's home page? When using external search engines, residents are often directed to specific pages within your site. Looking through our aggregate data, we see that up to 80% of residents may bypass your homepage and never see the top tasks showcased there [1].
Now you can add top tasks to navigation so no matter where a resident enters your site, they'll see a selection of the most sought-after information for the section they’re in. Even better, we've combined the power of top tasks with a new mega menu layout option to prominently display the most popular highways of your site [2].
How top tasks help residents
Promote the main highways of your site
TIP: Differentiate the style of your top tasks in navigation so residents quickly identify them.
Get residents where they need to go
Analyze your site's traffic to help determine the main destinations.
Increase resident satisfaction
Empower residents to get business done so they can go on enjoying everything your city has to offer.
Before you start, check out our best-practice guide for top tasks in navigation.
Once you're ready to extend your top tasks to navigation and see if a mega menu is right for you, have a chat with us about how to book in for a theme update.
Other great updates this release
A new role: OC Editor
A number of you have been asking for more granular control of content authoring, and we've created the OC Editor Role with that in mind. Users with this role can update existing content, but not create or delete pages. Assign this role just like you would any other.
COVID-19 announcements
Add prominent COVID-19 announcements (such as public health or temporary closure notices) to any page of your site with our special announcements feature. We introduced this temporary feature in March, and it will remain available for as long as it's a necessity. Contact us to enable it.
Extended logins
Now when you log in to the OpenCities admin area, that login will remain valid for a full working day. Grab a coffee, go to a meeting, or respond to an urgent email. The content you've been working on will still be there when you get back (up to 12 hours later). We're rolling out this change for everyone, so you don't have to do anything to benefit. If your organization has a shorter timeout policy, let us know and we'll update your settings to suit.
Finally, a note for developers
As part of our roll-out of top tasks in navigation, we've replaced the OC Do It Online content type with OC Top Tasks. This may affect developers using the OpenCities API to automatically update top tasks on their site homepage. We've had a look under the hood, and none of you are currently doing this, but just in case you've got some code in the works, now's the time to find and replace "oc-do-it-online" with "oc-top-tasks".
(We'll support both content types for a while to give you some leeway).
[1] 2019 OpenCities site traffic data across 20 of our largest client sites
[2] "Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation," Jakob Nielsen and Angie Li, Nielsen Norman Group, March 2017