City looking to connect citizens with new website

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on April 26, 2023.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

The City of Lethbridge has launched an improved version of its website, which will make it easier for residents to navigate by making it more user friendly.

Mayor Blaine Hyggen spoke to members of the media Tuesday and said the new website has been in the works for awhile, and when budget time came around, administration was able to put aside $277,000 for it. The cost includes website updates and a portal which will be coming soon.

“This an exciting day, we’ve all been looking at ways to navigate through city services and different things that we have on our website and at times it has been challenging,” said Hyggen.

He said sometimes navigating and finding things on the website was not the easiest, and it has been 20 years since the previous website was created, which caused the website to accumulate a lot of data.

 “For example, there’s over 2,000 pages of updates before that has been brought down now to just over 300 pages, and so with that it’s going to be easier to navigate; there’s buttons on the actual page there that you could click on. It’s just easier to navigate.”

The new site makes it easier to submit service requests to 311, and it highlights the recently added 311 online chat feature and provides a subscription option to receive news updates from the City in real time.

Wes Chapman, communications and engagement strategist and member of the project team, said the updated website is a starting point that gets them into a modern platform which will allow them to add a lot more flexibility in the future and a lot more tools that residents will benefit from.

“Right now, the website is way more user friendly, things are easier to find, things are organized a lot better,” Chapman said. “This is a huge change for us and a change for residents, so there is a bit of a learning curve, but it moves us into the future and it’s something that’s going to be far more useful for residence.”

Chapman said the way the website was organized before was by departments, the way they work at city hall, and now it is organized by how residents find things.

“We did a lot of user testing over the last year or so with residents and with staff to try to figure out where people were going to look for things, and we would organize the website that way.”

He said the website is service focused, he said there is an “I want to” button on the top corner that allows residents to navigate directly to the service they need.

“That’s for everything that residents can do with the city, so you can pay, apply and look up documents, find meeting minutes, things like that.”

He said moving forward his team is going to make sure the site is maintained and that documents and content are updated frequently to provide residents with the most relevant and current content as possible.

The next phase of this project will introduce a customizable citizen portal where residents can curate the content they want to see based on their address, needs and interests.

The portal will include a login to tailor things like waste and recycling pick-up schedules and link to individual information like taxes, utilities and dog licenses. This new function is expected to launch later this fall.

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