JEFFERSON CITY, MO, APRIL 30, 2022 - Heidi Rice, the web content coordinator with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ Office of Communications, has been selected as the State of Missouri and department Team Member of the
Month for April 2022. Rice was selected for her dedication to the department and for her efforts coordinating and facilitating the MoDNR Website Redesign Project in collaboration with the Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division (OA-ITSD).
In January 2017, it was announced that Adobe Contribute, the platform the department’s former website was built on, would be discontinued. The lack of support that would follow would lead to security issues. A new platform was needed to provide web services to employees and the public. After an in-depth planning process, the redesign project began. Its commencement coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing unexpected challenges, as many of the project collaborators were required to take on additional assignments related to the pandemic.
Despite these hurdles, Rice was able to keep over 80 department team members on track when developing a new sitemap during the first phase of the project. The next phase brought in more team members for a complete analysis of every page listed on the sitemap. Once this was complete, more than 90 program staff began writing text for the new webpages. Rice helped them stay on schedule by sending regular reminders, remaining available for troubleshooting and answering questions.
By redesigning and rebuilding the website in-house, Rice helped save the department and Missouri taxpayers thousands of dollars. She also helped meet and exceed the first goal of condensing the website by reducing it from a site that contained approximately 8,000 pages with more than 55,000 documents to around 960 pages with 4,000 documents.
“Heidi worked with our communications team to restructure the website and eliminate unnecessary pages, making the site easier to navigate and providing a more cohesive and consistent look and feel,” said Connie Patterson, the department’s communications director, who nominated Rice for the award. “Thanks to Heidi’s efforts, the new website is more secure and prominently features the agency’s popular services along with an all-inclusive document search.”
Rice designed and wrote step-by-step instructions for team members so they would be able to consistently upload documents and design pages in the future. Her patience was commendable, as she fielded hundreds of questions from staff members. She spent countless hours building and editing pages and then testing the new site, making certain the pages linked correctly and were accessible to all members of the public. The transition to the new website was completed Aug. 17, 2021.
“We have anticipated this deployment for more than five years! OA-ITSD Project Manager Randy Folliard and I heard multiple times that this was one of the smoothest deployments the Web Team has been a part of, and our MoDNR teammates are a major reason for that,” said Brandon Ousley, a client services manager with OA-ITSD. “We wouldn’t be anywhere without them helping lead the way.”
Rice joined the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in December 1997 and resides in Camdenton.