Yuma County, Arizona Debuts Official Government Site In Spanish

March 4, 2005

BY GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY NEWS STAFF

Yuma County, Arizona recently announced the launch of its official county Web site "En Espanol" to better serve its Spanish-speaking residents. Residents can now access county information and services in Spanish by simply clicking on the "En Espanol" link on the home page.

"Since its founding in 1864, Yuma County's population has included a large number of Spanish-speaking residents, and we're always trying to maximize the accessibility of our services to residents," explains Matt McClymonds, Yuma County chief information officer. "We're very proud that this community is a leader when it comes to reaching out to its culturally diverse population. This has been a goal of ours for some time, but our commitment to the efficient use of resources coupled with the technical difficulties of maintaining a dual-language Web site had limited us in the past."

By combining professional human translations with proprietary software tools that remove any upfront IT development and technical integration, the county was able to launch the Web site in less than 60 days. Additionally, there are no ongoing maintenance headaches because the proprietary tools dynamically keep Yuma County's Spanish site in sync with its English counterpart (including text, translatable images, alt tags, meta tags, etc.). Yuma County's staff continues to monitor and update the English-language site as usual, and MotionPoint maintains the Spanish version of the site.

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