Town wants to hear from you on website improvements

Yorkregion.com
Jan. 22, 2015
By Kim Zarzour

Have you visited the Town of Richmond Hill’s website?

Do you have ideas on how it can be improved?

The town is enhancing its online presence at richmondhill.ca, and is looking for input from website users and residents.

You can have your say by participating in a 10-minute website redevelopment survey, available until Jan. 23.

Focus groups are also planned for the coming weeks with an anticipated launch of the newly redesigned website in 2016, said Meeta Gandhi, director of communication services.

“This will be a complete revamp; we’re not just moving things around,” she said. “We’re looking to the community for redesign ideas.”

The current website was developed in 2002 when the town’s population was approximately 132,000, she said. Population now stands at about 200,000.

While some changes were made to the website in 2010, when the town adopted a new logo, the functionality has not been substantially changed in more than 10 years, she said.

“We need to bring it up to date because right now it’s a lot of text. It needs more graphics and it’s not equally accessible on different devices.”

As well, she said, the current website is “town-centric” with an emphasis on the municipality’s departments. Improvements will make it more “citizen-centric” and organized according to audience segments, such as seniors, parents or business owners.

Improved search capability and transaction-based services are also planned, she said.

The town set aside $400,000 in last year’s capital budget and an additional $400,000 this year to help pay for the process. While the cost has not been tallied yet, she said it is expected to be well within that amount.

“The website is a huge component of our interaction with the community. It’s increasingly used to provide information or transactional services.”

In 2014 the Richmond Hill website was visited 736,733 times and those visitors generated 3,595,536 page views.

Feedback from the survey will be used to develop mock sites, which will be tested at focus group sessions through the summer.

To learn more about the focus groups, contact Gandhi at meeta.gandhi@richmondhill.ca