By Dominic Abassi

City of Nanaimo launches revamped mobile-friendly website

Aug 14, 2017 | 5:30 PM

NANAIMO — After nearly three years of work and almost $100,000, the City of Nanaimo’s new website is live.

The brand new nanaimo.ca is designed to be more mobile-friendly, as well as easier and faster to navigate. It replaces a City website which launched in 2008 and is the culmination of work that began in September 2014.

Ross Collicutt, senior applications analyst with the City, said having an easy-to-use website is absolutely essential, noting staff use it just as much as citizens.

“We get millions of hits on the site every year for people looking for information they need for work, travel, personal, home and property,” Collicutt said. “If the site as we have it now is going to save people a few minutes here and there finding the information they need, that’s going to add up to a lot of time over the course of the year.”

Collicutt said the City spent $92,000 on outside help for the new website.

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The project originally began with a much smaller goal of simply replacing the framework which runs the site, he said. “After a public survey, a lot of users weren’t able to find the content they needed as fast as they could. So we decided to extend the project and rewrite a lot of the content and reorganize it so that it makes more sense to the user versus just being organized under city departments.”

Collicutt said a major focus was making the site easier to use on mobile devices, adding more than half of the tens of thousands of users that log on every day are using phones or tablets. He said the new format is also more flexible and easier to modify in-house, which will eliminate the need to spend external money to do updates.

dom@nanaimonewsnow.com

On Twitter: @domabassi