New City website coming soon

By Randy Bell    

Clinton’s Director of Communication and Tourism says the City’s website needs an overhaul – and a new direction. 

“Currently, we have a very tourism-focused website that we established in 2023,” says Marlee Price-Cook.  “Now, we are moving to a more civic-focused website.” 

And for good reason. 

“Ninety-nine per cent of our users are current residents of Clinton,” Price-Cook points out.   So, instead of catering to people who visit the city, she says the new website will be aimed more at helping the folks who live here, and the City will save money in the process.

Price-Cook requested $15,000 in the new City budget to hire CivicPlus to design the website.  She says that’s substantially less than what the City is paying now. 

CivicPlus says the websites it builds for government are intended to be “a digital city hall.”  The company has more than 13,000 local government customers.

“They know what they’re doing as far as the structure of information,” Price-Cook says.  The idea is to put the top priorities on the homepage, so that users don’t have to click through a lot of pages to find what they’re looking for. 

“I’m also having the department heads go over their pages to identify what’s important [and] what might be missing, so we get that right the first time.” 

She says information that’s currently being fed to the website manually will be sent to the new site automatically. 

Something new: posting City alerts on the website, so that citizens will see that important information when they log on.   Price-Cook says functionality will be the focus, with an emphasis on the information residents are seeking, “as opposed to just making [the website] look pretty.”

Although the platform will be shifting away from tourism information, she says Clinton visitors won’t be ignored. 

“We still want to accommodate tourists, and I think there will definitely be a tab on the website that’s a landing page [for tourist information].”