City plans “user-friendly” website
By Randy Bell
The current City website’s home page is one a several that will be revamped in the coming months to make the site easier for residents to navigate.
Some changes are in the works for the City of Clinton’s website.
“I know there have been some complaints about the way our website looks now,” Director of Communications and Tourism Marlee Price-Cook told the Board of Aldermen November 4. She believes clintonms.org leans too much toward promoting tourism and not enough toward providing Clintonians an easy way to access the information they need.
“People who are coming to our website are coming for a purpose,” Price-Cook told the Board. “Our website is being utilized by [Clinton] residents. And they come there, a majority of the time, to perform an action, whether it’s paying a bill online, [to look at] job openings [or] looking for a phone number to contact a department. So, we’re going to make it a little more user-friendly and a little more accessible for what people are actually searching for on our website.”
She notes that the City’s online presence is due for a reexamination.
“It’s been three years since we updated the website, so it needed a little refresh. We’re not going to do a complete overhaul like we did last time, [instead] simply looking at what we have now, what works, what doesn’t work. That will include a lot of changes to the homepage.”
Instead of a Wyatt Waters watercolor as the backdrop, Price-Cook says the homepage will feature new imagery, possibly drone footage of the city or a scrolling carousel of photos.
“But we will keep Wyatt Waters on our website in special places, because he is a great component of Clinton.”
She’s hoping the planned changes will result in a better experience for website users.
“We will be updating the search [function] to go a little more in-depth as to what is contained within those drop-down menus, so maybe people can find stuff easier.”
Price-Cook believes part of the problem has been that people had gotten accustomed to how to find information on the old website.
“And then we put it in a new place, and they just haven’t been able to navigate [to] it,” she says.
According to Price-Cook, it may take six months or more to make the changes.
“Instead of outsourcing it and going to an agency and saying, ‘Hey, here’s what I want, build it,’ it will be me making the updates. It’s not something I can do overnight. It’s going to happen periodically. We may start with the homepage and then work on the department pages.”
But she plans to get plenty of input from others in City government.
“This is the first phase, where I’m going through [the website] with Breana Norton, our chief of staff, and doing a ‘mind map’ of what we think would work best. The next phase will be meeting with each department individually.”
Price-Cook says when she did that while preparing for the previous website update, she basically tried to give the department heads what they asked for.
“Now, I know what I need from a resident’s perspective, making sure that what is on [each department’s] webpage is reflective of what people go there searching for.”
