By David F. Rooney
This Friday afternoon at about 4 pm the City’s stodgy, dodgy website will be relegated to the dustbin of local history as it is replaced by a sleek, brand-new website that better reflects Revelstoke’s aspirations.
Tania McCabe, the City’s deputy director of finance, told City Council, meeting as a Committee of the Whole (CoW), that the new site was built by CivicPlus, a Kansas City-based company that has built more than 700 websites for municipal, county and regional governments across North America.
CivicPlus was selected to build the new website from a field of 30 local, regional and international bidders. It was the only one that could produce the kind of site the City’s Website Design Committee wanted within Revelstoke’s $20,000 budget. Local web developers wanted double the city’s budget to produce a similar welbsite , McCabe said.
Committee member Gail Ferguson ran a Power Point presentation (click here to view it as a PDF document) that outlined many of the new website’s features. Visually, the site is a far cry from the old, dull site. It will feature a rotating photo gallery of scenes taken around the city and a number of subsidiary images that will be keyed to different seasons, such as mountain biker for summer and a skier and snowmobiler for the winter.
The new City website used a content-management system not unlike that used by The Current. It will allow people to follow municipal affairs using Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds (this is the acronym for the term Really Simple Syndication, these are web-feed formats used to publish frequently updated works — such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video — in a standardized format). They will also be able to access all municipal documents, including bylaws, and apply for certain kinds of permits as well as lay complaints online.
While the City will have a number of site administrators who will ensure its functionality, future updating of the site’s content will be the responsibility of senior department managers.
The new website will be uploaded onto the web at 4 pm on Friday, June.
