Contacts:
Thad Noll, Assistant County Manager
970-453-3438, thad.noll@summitcountyco.gov

Julie Sutor, Public Affairs Coordinator
970-453-3498, julie.sutor@summitcountyco.gov

SUMMIT COUNTY – Summit County government announced today that it is changing its website domain, staff email addresses and logo to allow for easier and clearer communication with residents and visitors about Summit County services and programs.

“We wanted to make things simpler and more intuitive for our citizens, whether they’re looking for information on our programs, doing business with our staff and elected officials or understanding who provides their services,” Summit County Commissioner Karn Stiegelmeier said. “Our new website and email addresses are going to be far easier to remember than the old ones, and we have a new, streamlined logo that will be much more recognizable out in the community.”

The county’s new website domain is www.SummitCountyCO.gov, and the new email address convention is Firstname.Lastname@SummitCountyCO.gov. The switch from the old domain took place before the start of business Wednesday, and the new addresses are effective immediately. The old domain was www.co.summit.co.us.

“The old address was a real mouthful, and it was pretty cumbersome to type into a smartphone,” Summit County Commissioner Dan Gibbs said. “And having a dot-gov top-level domain makes it more clear to people that we’re their county government organization.”

Links and messages to the old addresses will be automatically redirected to the new ones for several months, so electronic communications with Summit County personnel should be subject to few if any interruptions. However, constituents, partner organizations and customers are encouraged to update county email addresses in their contacts lists and to update links from their own websites to pages on the Summit County website.

While the domain has changed for all Summit County web pages, the remainder of each URL will remain the same. In other words, a web page that used to have the URL www.co.summit.co.us/example now has the URL www.SummitCountyCO.gov/example. Neither the URLs nor email addresses are case sensitive.

Implementation of the new logo will be a more gradual process, in order to minimize costs associated with the transition. The new logo is primarily typeface, with “Summit County, Colorado,” in green and gray. A mountain range is represented in blue above the type. Many felt the old logo, which had been in place since 1999, was an appealing representation of the Summit County environment, but that it was technically difficult to use in a wide variety of applications.

“We needed a clean, modern logo that’s clearly visible on everything from a nametag to the side of an ambulance,” Commissioner Thomas Davidson said. “It’s important for our citizens to be able to easily recognize us and understand who we are, whether they’re receiving communications from us or seeing our work out on the road or the trail.”

In the coming months, Summit County will be working on a redesign of its website to improve the content and ease of navigation for website users. The new logo will be incorporated into the website design as part of the larger project to make the site more user-friendly.

“Our residents and visitors have an expectation that we’re providing quality, timely information about our services, processes, programs and regulations, and that it’s all organized in a way that makes it easy to find,” Commissioner Gibbs said. “So our staff is working hard to improve our constituents’ online experience.”