About PVA

From a tax standpoint, if you want to find out what your property is worth, the PVA is where you go. The Jefferson County Property Valuation Administrator’s office is the largest PVA office in Kentucky, with a nearly $56 billion assessment roll. Boone County is the fastest growing county in the state. The PVA mission: to assess all property for tax purposes, maintain accurate parcel information, and make this information easily accessible to the public. At a basic level, the PVA offers information for free. For more in-depth information, the PVA offers a wide variety of subscription options.

The Challenge

Both PVA office websites were in need of an update. The navigation of Jefferson County’s site was confusing and redundant, while Boone County offered none of the advanced search options increasingly being required by their constituents. Jefferson County had a subscriber base of thousands so the transition between old site and new site had to be seamless. Add to that a very strict deadline, and you’ve got yourself a challenging project!

VIA’s Role

Information Architecture

The most important directive of the Jefferson County PVA website is to produce information as quickly and effortlessly as possible. This requires intuitive navigation and content delivery through well thought out information design.

The process included:

• Studying the layout and traffic patterns of the existing website
• Sending out a survey to existing users asking them for improvements they would like to see
• Gathering the most frequently answered questions to the PVA offices

We determined the majority of site traffic went to three key areas so we created prominent entry points for this information while always maintaining a goal of being only two clicks away from the information users want.

Property Search

The PVA website should provide accurate, detailed, and useful property value information. With this in mind we improved the property search section while keeping all information that users of the site had come to expect. We spent time developing a more useful and appealing presentation for the property listings and property details pages.

The details page now provides more information at the top of the page and includes a photo gallery for all property images. We performed database analysis to improve queries on the large set of property data. We were able to increase the efficiency and performance of the Property Search feature, and continue to optimize this feature.

Subscription Service

Although obtaining property information through the PVA office is technically free, the cost of providing a web service is not. We designed and built a subscription service from scratch that plugs nicely into each PVA site. It provides increased account management, tracks the number of active sessions, and gives options for upgrading subscriptions.

To add value, the new site offers a Neighborhood Sales Search with the Advanced Property Search for one low price where as it was billed separately as an add-on service. In addition to the PVA sites, this advanced type of subscription ecommerce is something that we intend to use on upcoming sites we are building.

Content Management

The website was built in Wordpress so the PVA staff can now update their own content to help cut back on site maintenance costs. Ongoing security updates are easily handled, because the CMS is not proprietary.

The list of improvements go on and on:

• Video: Ability to easily embed video on the site, as well as a screen-cast to help visitors through the subscriber process.
• News & Blog: The PVA now has the ability to communicate with their constituents through an easily updated blog feature.
• Dedicated Server: We built a dedicated server to handle the traffic the site generates. This server gives PVA complete ownership and accountability.
• Advanced Tracking and Analytics: Google Analytics and other tracking mechanisms are now on the site. Future improvements will be implemented from real data and not guesswork.
• Google Apps: Jefferson PVA has now completely migrated to Google Apps Premiere for all their email, calendar and document management.
• Website Promotions: To build excitement and create awareness, we hosted surveys, composed and managed email newsletters and, launched the new PVA site with a press conference.

Coming Soon: PVA mobile app utilizing GPS location to retrieve local property values with improved map data.