On Jan. 26, the City of Bend unveiled its new website to the public. With big, bubbly visuals, a prominent search bar atop the homepage, and revamped menu organization across the board, the new bendoregon.gov is quite a departure from the previous iteration.
The redesign project began in the summer of 2024 when the City issued a Request for Proposal for the job. Moxie Sozo, a creative branding agency based in Boulder, Colorado was selected, beginning work in January 2025.
The company, which calls itself “eco-friendly” and claims to be “100% carbon neutral,” has previously worked for clients such as Campari America, Organic Valley and Visit Bend, a local tourism promoter.
“It was a collaborative process with Moxie Sozo taking the lead on design and us providing user research and feedback along the way,” City of Bend spokesperson Jacob Larsen told the Source.
The last rehaul of the City’s website design came almost ten years ago. More recently, the City has made its digital presentation a priority. “In 2021, one of City Council’s goals was ‘Accessible & Effective City Government.’ One of the City’s tasks, as part of this goal, was to create a human-centered design approach to improve the City’s website,” Larsen said.
“In 2021-22, the City conducted user research to determine the specific pain points of the website, and in general, how the community used the site,” he continued. “With the feedback from the community, we designed a website with community needs at the forefront, improving the search function on the website to easily bring users more relevant content and making the most used web pages more streamlined and transactional.”
The City hopes that heavily visited pages, like Development and Permitting and Water Services Billing, will be “easy to find and streamlined to make accessing these resources a much smoother experience.”
“The updated site features a fully responsive design that works well on phones and tablets, improved keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility, and better support for built-in translation tools so community members can access information in the language that works best for them,” Larsen said, adding that “website content has been re-written… at an eighth grade reading level to help meet accessibility standards.”
The total cost of the redesign is $218,000, Larsen said. But that expense comes with “cost savings in the long run,” he told the Source. “The cost of hosting the content in Oregon and maintaining subscriptions for all plugins is approximately $6,000,” he said, whereas it cost $13,500 to operate the old website in 2025.
In 2024, the City of Bend website received more than 1.5 million views.
More information about the redesign can be found here.
This article appears in the Source January 29, 2026.
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