When the new city of Aurora website home page came up on the large screens at this week’s City Council meeting, there were some audible “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience.
“Oh, thank you, we like to hear that,” said Clayton Muhammad, director of communications for the city, with perhaps a slight sound of relief in his voice.
Muhammad has been working with Civic Plus to develop the new site for more than a year. It will replace a site that has been with the city for more than 10 years, and has been the subject of complaints about being old, ugly, and hard to navigate – to put it nicely.
“We’ve all heard many comments about our website,” said Mayor Robert O’Connor. “I don’t want to repeat those words that have been said about it.”
In contrast, Muhammad described the new site as “really clean, really contemporary, really sleek.” He called the site “responsive” and said that anything a person sees on the computer will be the same as it is seen on other devices, such as a smart phone or tablet. He said the site is “content-managed,” allowing department and division heads to update information themselves, instead of having to go to a central technology person.
“We’ve already trained 32 people to update,” Muhammad said.
Everyone will get a chance to see and try the new site sometime this weekend, when it goes live.
Civic Plus spent a lot of time researching Aurora, meeting with officials, citizens and even hearing the complaints about the old site. The company has done such local sites as Elgin, Highland Park, Lisle and Plano, and also has done larger cities, such as Buffalo and Plano, Texas (with a population close to Aurora’s).
The new site features more on the home page, including news headlines, what Muhammad called a “robust” calendar and even a Facebook Live feed. There also is a feature where people can click on city services listed alphabetically, rather than having to go through the departments.
After the launch this weekend, Muhammad said the final part of the process is to “morph it into what we want by hearing the comments.”
