City of Pittsfield Website Gets a New Look
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The city has a revamped website that went live on Thursday with the goal of making Pittsfield's internet portal more visually vibrant and its information more accessible.
"Revize was our vendor of choice as the city was able to leverage the company's years of experience in government website design to create a modern web presence with broad accessibility across a number of devices," said the city's IT Director Mike Steben in a statement. The ability for users to access the city of Pittsfield's website using their cell phone or tablet was a frequently requested feature that our old website, which, bearing the burden of age, simply did not handle well."
Fifty percent of existing users access the website with handheld devices, he said.
Parts of the site are still being populated but some of the new features include:
- Emergency Alert Center with email alerts
- Document Center with document topic search
- Email notify for resident email alerts for web page updates
- FAQs
- News Center with Facebook/Twitter integration
- Quick link buttons
- Personal social media sharing app
- Language Translator
- Resident Request Center
- Enhanced online bill pay
- Staff directory
Users should be able to find the information they need with two to three clicks from the home page.
The city's network specialist Scott Connors and website project manager said the redesign began last July to keep Pittsfield up to date compared with other community portals. The last significant update was done in 2012.
"The No. 1 priority of the overall project was our customer's ease of use. We looked at several web designs throughout the country to come up with the most innovative design to offer residents, businesses and tourists who visit our site," Connors said. "With more of our customers going to online services such as permitting, reporting issues, online payments, we wanted to make the website an easily accessible tool for people."
Following the launch of the new site, the city will also be transitioning from e-Gov to a new engagement platform, Accela, later this spring. More information will be shared nearer to the launch date for this resource. The city worked with Revize Government Websites, its current website provider, to complete the upgrades.
"The main objective for Revize was to create a self-government website with resident engagement features so residents can be involved in Pittsfield local government without even having to visit the website on a daily basis," said Joseph Nagrant, Revize's business development director.
Tags: Internet, website,
