FirstGov.gov Refresh.

Aquilent, Inc. announced the award of a contract from the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communication (OCSC) to provide services to design and test the user experience, information architecture, and branding for FirstGov.Gov and FirstGov en Español (espanol.gov). The initial purchase order for the site refresh is valued at $836,000, with four option years.

Aquilent’s web and user experience teams will work with OCSC’s FirstGov team to refresh the look and feel, branding, design, and navigation of both sites. The team will research public expectations and use industry best practices for the site redesign to improve the appearance, citizen satisfaction, and appropriate cultural elements. FirstGov.gov was launched in September 2000 and provides the only cross-agency, cross-branch, intergovernmental consolidation of government web service and information in the United States. With more than 550 pages of content and 21,000 external links, FirstGov.gov has been very popular since its launch. According to the Marketleap Search Engine Marketing Tool, the site is the 6th most linked-to site on the internet with 78 million visitors and 203 million page views in FY04. “Aquilent has always felt a strong pride in FirstGov and much of our work for other federal web sites has its roots in our work with GSA on the original launch of FirstGov,” said David Fout, Aquilent’s President and CEO.

Aquilent will serve as the prime contractor and have two subcontractors, Captura Group, a pioneer in the development of in-language and in-culture Hispanic online solutions, and Shugoll Research, a woman-owned full-service market research firm specializing in qualitative and quantitative research, operating a research and usability facility, in Bethesda, MD.