Welcome to the
New RCC Website
You are about to experience the result of months of collaborative work between RCC leadership, staff, patrons, partners and our selected website design team, United Experts. We hope you find this new website meets your needs and provides you with a pleasant and productive visiting experience – and especially that it will prompt you to join us in one or more of the thousands of experiences RCC and its partners bring to the Reston community each year to enrich lives and build community for all of Reston.
Please be sure to give us your feedback – using the “Feedback” button on every page. You can also find out about the improvements (and what we continue to work to improve) below on this page. We extend our thanks to all who helped us in this important project and look forward to maintaining a website built to serve your interests.
New, modern design
The new RCC website features a modern and elegant design focused on providing content clarity. The design, User Interface (UI) and all content elements are responsive and fully optimized for different screen sizes and devices from smartphones to extra-large screens.
Built with collaboration
The new website was a collaborative effort between the agency’s vendor, United Experts, RCC leadership, staff teams, patrons and community partners. Users are invited to provide feedback for RCC and United Experts to use to continue to improve the website as the community experiences it.
New content architecture
The RCC Media Team and United Experts have carried out an extensive process of restructuring and reorganizing RCC website content. Content is presented in three main categories: Things to Do, Info and Facilities. These main content areas are located at the top level of the navigation bar where each one opens a “mega menu” with direct links to related sections and sub-sections.
RCC topics have landing pages with relevant information in one place. For example, the Swim Landing Page features important notifications related to swimming, links to swim-related content, FAQs, highlights, and news and updates.
Powerful search and filtering
Fast search producing relevant and accurate results is essential for a great user experience. The new website features multiple search and filtering tools. General search is available through the website’s header and searches through the entire website content. The search interface pops up with one click and presents results as users type in the box. PDFs and other document archives are now fully searchable. The website search module can search within them.
Separate search and filtering tools are optimized for each content type. For example, the Events Calendar has its own search and filtering tools enabling visitors to filter by event type, location, age, day of week, time of day and cost. Similarly, other content types like documents, staff members and publications have their own search and filtering variations.
Vibrant Events Calendar
Our brand-new Events Calendar is a feature the community has desired for years. Some of the new capabilities are:
- Powerful event search and filtering by event type, event series, location, age, day of week, time of day and cost.
- Multiple views: photo, list, month, day, week and map.
- Event filtering by a date range or a specific day.
- Stylish presentation of event details, featuring an overview of key information and action buttons, such as registration or ticket purchasing.
- Multimedia-enhanced event presentation that supports additional event content in the form of videos, image galleries, attachments, links and multiple artist-related source content.
- Listing of related events based on selected event types, event series, venues, organizers, event categories and dates.
- Convenient functionality such as adding an event to a user’s calendar or subscribing to RCC’s calendar, which supports multiple applications and formats such as Google Calendar, iCalendar and Outlook 365.
- Support for recurring events, which provides users with the convenience of easily viewing all events with a regular schedule or those that are part of an event series.
Calendar Partner app for event submission and management
The new website features a long-promised capacity for calendar partners to submit and manage their own event information. RCC’s Community Partners in Small District 5 (Reston zip codes) are invited to use the new “Community Calendar” to post information for inclusive community-oriented events. RCC reserves the right to edit events for clarity, grammar and style, or to reject an event if it is missing information or in violation of our Terms of Service.
The calendar web app enables collaboration between RCC and community partners to provide people living, working or visiting in Reston to find leisure-time experiences in one convenient location.
Improved myRCC
Users are reminded that while the new website was created “scratch” – it still only provides connection to RCC’s two platforms for purchases, myRCC and ETix. We understand user frustrations with myRCC and are continuing to work with Vermont Systems, and their software product RecTrac, to improve how myRCC works for its users. Patrons will find a new, better-organized landing page for myRCC and we will be seeking further enhancements to make enrollment, pass purchasing and reservations as easy as possible. The ETix platform will continue to improve with that company’s efforts to create a user-friendly ticket-buying experience.
Multilingual Content
To accommodate RCC’s non-English speaking patrons, the new website features a powerful translation tool. At the click of a button, the tool translates all content and the user interface via an Artificial Intelligence-powered Google API (Application Programming Interface). Simply put, the tool provides convenience for the user by fully and seamlessly shifting the language for all text to the one selected by the user.
Enhanced Accessibility
Web accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring that there are no barriers which prevent interaction with, or access to, websites by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, or with socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. The new website follows ADA guidelines for 50 success criteria factors from all applicable technical standards.
The website content is optimized for specialized accessibility software and browser tools.
New Help Center
Another convenient path to information for RCC patrons is the newly built Help Center and system for handling FAQs and How-To-Guides. This knowledge-based system is designed to make it easier for patrons to find information independently, without having to call RCC for help.
The main Help Center page serves as a home page for help, featuring powerful search functionality and quick links to RCC’s most popular FAQs. Additionally, FAQs appear on other relevant web pages.
Digitalized forms
With the new website, RCC has started the digitalization of some of our user forms. The form data is automatically made available to appropriate RCC staff. As the new approach is used, RCC may modify these or add to the menu of digitalized forms.
Contextual notification system
A new notification system is built into the website. The RCC team can now quickly and easily publish notifications on selected pages, website sections, or the entire website. The system improves information quality and speed of publishing while ensuring that notifications show up exactly where they matter and where patrons would expect to see them.
Contextual information
and data semantics
In contrast to the old website, which presented most content as static pages with pure text and pictures, the new website has been designed to provide meaning to the data it features. For example, a list of FAQs on the old website was just plain text presented on a web page. In the new website, each question and answer are a data item which includes data semantics adding further meaning to it. This enables the presentation of content automatically on multiple web pages based on the context of other information.
Instead of having plain pages, the new RCC website features 26 data content types which are “smart” and context-aware. This modern technical solution brings more relevant content to website users.
Digitalized documents and publications archives
PDF and other document archives are now fully searchable. The website search module can search within documents and has the capacity to enrich each document with related metadata.
Other notable features
- A new powerful Content Management System
- Event calendar automation and RecTrac integration
- Web app functionality blended into web pages
- New scalable, high-performance hosting infrastructure
- Faster system performance
- Increased security
- Search engine optimization
- Image/photo protection
- Advanced video player
- Embedded content microdata
- New system analytics and reporting
Built for the future
The new website is data-driven and employs a responsive, customized content management system. This approach provides immediate benefits to all users by enabling contextual information and enhanced search functionality.
It delivers an entirely new approach to content management, which in turn provides RCC staff with opportunities to make further improvements to the website’s content, design and functionality.
The RCC Media Team can do things previously done only by developers or by other technical stuff. This will result in savings in time and costs while simultaneously ensuring that content is published faster and is of higher quality.
Importantly, it also provides a foundation built for the future as the website data is now available via API (Application Programming Interface) for integration with other applications, websites, and website modules.
Let us know what you think by providing your feedback using the “Feedback” button on every page. We extend our thanks to all who helped us in this important project and look forward to maintaining a website built to serve your interests.
