The City of Revelstoke quietly launched a revamped website last week — the first update the site has received in more than five years.
“It’s been a total re-haul but we are just gently going into it,” said Dawn Levesque, the city’s corporate administrator. “Because it was such a change we wanted to ensure all the links are working. We haven’t pushed it out through media or a press release yet.”
The new site went live Thursday, Dec. 15, at noon. The upgrade was done by Civic Plus, which built the city’s previous website, at a cost of $25,000.
The site features a cleaner look, with a big photo across the main page, drop-down menus linking to city departments and popular pages along the top, and links to news, events and major municipal issues below.
Levesque said the goal was to bring the site inline with best practices used by other municipal governments. “It’s easier access, easier to find documentation, information, more engagement.”
There are four main menus across the top. The first brings you to the council page, which features bios of each councillor, meeting schedules and links to council’s goals and objectives.
The ‘City Services’ menu provides links to each city department. The department pages have been cleaned up and are easier to navigate.
“There’s not so much drilling down and trying to find things,” said Levesque. “People don’t want to scroll and they don’t want to dig down — they want stuff right there.”
The ‘Exploring Our Community’ section provides links to pages that highlight Revelstoke. ‘I’d Like To?’ provides links to popular topics like the garbage pickup schedule, aquatic centre hours and bus schedule.
Below the main photo are links to SeeClickFix, council documents, city hall contacts and a page to sign up for email notifications.
Scrolling further down, you come to the latest news posts and a sidebar showing the city’s Facebook page. That’s followed by the events calendar. Lastly is a section called ‘Revelstoke Spotlights’ that Levesque said will provide links to major issues of interest to the community.
“Next time we have a public hearing, everything will be right there on one click. We can also accept community engagement through there,” she said. “If have another shopping mall scenario, we can put it down there so everyone can find everything.”
The changes to the site are largely cosmetic; the content appears similar to what it was before. Levesque said they are going through the site, looking for any issues.
“We have a group of girls trying to make it more consistent and user friendly,” she said.
Check out the new site at Revelstoke.ca
