Fairfax County unveils new look with website redesign

(Updated 11:00 a.m.) Visitors to Fairfax County’s website may have noticed that it recently got a digitized makeover.

Going live on Friday, July 7, the website update offers a range of upgraded services, including a bilingual virtual assistant with added Spanish language features and a “more readily available” language translation tool. Plans for the update were announced late last year.

Users can now also access a new email newsletter subscription management platform, giving “County agencies the ability to share more visually compelling content via email and text” and expand their “electronic outreach,” a county spokesperson told FFXnow.

The website’s homepage also got a facelift, focusing more heavily on the county’s Strategic Plan, One Fairfax and data analytics. The updated homepage further strives to foster more community involvement through an Engage Fairfax County portal.

Direct links to popular County services, such as real estate assessments, the PLUS land use and permit database, library access and park classes, continue to feature prominently on the homepage, the county says.

While information, links, site structure and department content remain the same, the county strove to update the visual presentation of the website’s information through “a new color palette and more modern elements,” the county said.

These costless changes were largely driven by feedback acquired from a 2022 public survey, which was used to create a draft design that the county says “received accolades from employees and the community.”

However, since the update launch, some website users have reported experiencing technical difficulties. For some, navigating the website prompted error messages that denied them further access to certain webpages.

“As with the launch of any new design of a website, the traffic to view and use the new site increases, which might have caused users to experience some challenges,” the county spokesperson told FFXnow. “We apologize to our customers that experienced any problems. We will continue to monitor and optimize performance.”