City of Prince Rupert's new website features more functionality, while highlighting new graphics presentation for civic communication

A new look and some new tools are among the features of the
civic website upgrade introduced earlier this month

Residents of Prince Rupert looking for civic updates and those visitors surfing the internet looking for information on the community have an updated resource to work with, the City introducing their upgrade to the civic website earlier this month.

The debut for the new information portal came with a presentation to City Council at the July council session, with Veronika Stewart, the City's Director of Communication, Engagement and Social Developing taking Council members and those viewing at home through some of the features of the upgraded portal.

Ms Stewart outlined how the current website was becoming more challenging to maintain as it aged and then provided some notes on the look to the new features and how it incorporates the new city logo design and branding.

"If you Google Prince Rupert, the city's website is the first thing that comes up, so it's our best face forward that we can provide to people that are looking to either invest in Prince Rupert, visit Prince Rupert, live here, or for existing residents. 

So it's really important that we have a good strong website. There were some challenges with the existing website because we have lost the person who built it in house initially so some of the updating for the website has been challenging because there's less familiarity with we development with existing staff ...

So we looked at you know finding another way forward that was easier for staff to maintain and also that incorporated our new city brand. 

So that was one of the considerations as well that we do have a new city brand with new standards and colours and design elements that we would like to incorporate better into our website."

Ms. Stewart also observed of the opportunity to incorporate the new look at a minimal cost.

"The cost was 5,000 dollars this year to migrate all of the content over and develop a new site based on a template based system. 

And then going forward, there's around 2,500 dollars annual fee for maintenance, web hosting, security, regular updates of mobility and accessibility standards that would otherwise be of in house capacity and development costs that we might have to outsource if we don't that capacity in house.

And we should also note that this is one effort among many towards community renewal and so you know the online web presence isn't going feel like the most important pressing thing I know for many people who are looking to the community and saying you know we need to revitalize other areas and focus on housing and downtown revitalization for instance.

But this is part of how we package the information that we share about what initiatives that we are doing around those projects"

 A slideshow that was part of the presentation provided additional details to the new civic information piece.

The Communications Director noted that the city is welcoming comments and observations from the public and those who use the site towards the new look for the city's face to the world.

Council members and senior staff also had some thoughts on the new look as it was revealed at the July session.

City Manager Rob Buchan paid tribute to the work of the civic staff towards the development of the new portal and observed of the financial benefit that came from the creation of the new site.

"I just want to take a quick moment to commend the work that Ms. Stewart has done here, 5,000 dollars cost, plus some staff time. To have this outsourced for a full rebuild would have been between 150 thousand and 250 thousand dollars.

We've been talking about doing this at least for the time that I've been involved with Prince Rupert and funding has been an issue but the need to do this has been pressing.

So to do this for this cost, you know shows how staff work really hard to do things with less and the timing for doing this is remarkably quick too. Bearing in mind all the other things that staff do. This is very impressive"

Councillor Randhawa asked about the potential for reporting on items such as potholes, Ms. Stewart observed that the public works reporting will be a feature as well as that residents can use the app.

Councillor Cunningham also paid tribute to the work and look of the new website plan. 

As it launched earlier this month, a few gremlins popped up to keep administrators on their toes.  

The early days featured a lack of information on career opportunities and other broken links in some information sharing areas, along with a loss of links to some past information on City Council agendas.

Areas where work continues to return those elements and a few others current as the launch continues.

You can review the presentation to get a sense of what the project offers the community from the City's Video archive from July 24th, Ms. Stewart's overview of the new civic look opens up the council session.

One item of note from Ms. Stewart's presentation was the highlighting of the feature that translates the website into a vast library of global languages from Afrikaans to  Zulu ... 

One language however,  is still to be represented in that feature, that being Ts'msyen Sm'algyax.

With some of the website upgrade observed as part of community renewal, the new website could provide an opportunity towards the city's ongoing commitment to reconciliation. 

Towards that, adding the language of the First Nations of the territories towards some of the elements of the online presentation would seem to be a natural evolution for the future. 

And perhaps a project of reconciliation for the city to pursue some grant funding towards.

You can test the new look portal out here.

More notes from the July 24th Council session can be explored from our Session archive page.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.