The City of Elliot Lake has just rolled out a new city website described by City CAO Daniel Gagnon as, "Way more dynamic," than the City's previous website.
Long in its creation, Gagnon said, "It's also about accessibility and efficiency to find what you want."
If you have a city-based problem or a query, you can now submit a picture about your issue online to give city officials more information so they can help find you an answer, or so you can inform them about a problem.
Gagnon gave members of City Council a live demonstration of the new setup via the audio-video system in City Hall council chambers, part of the Council meeting last Tuesday night. He said each city department is responsible for posting its own new information to keep the site current.
"Everything you see is managed by a very sophisticated content management software system in the back end," he said. "The IT people are continuing to work on it to get the 'search' function up and running which he labelled as a work in progress."
Gagnon said the new website is very flexible.
"The only thing that's kind of hard ingrained are the buckets near the top of the Home Page. Those categories and all the individual pages were selected through community input sessions where we had stakeholder groups."
"These are more modern features that our users expect from a website," Gagnon said. "The big banner images are the ways to go within it where you have your category. So as you hover your mouse over, you see all the sub-categories."
"I think what we're going to get to know is the public has a way more dynamic site than the old website, even in its heyday," Gagnon continued. "There's a section called 'I want to' and it pulls up another shortcut. The idea here is that with the fewest amounts of clicks you can get to where you need to go. That's what websites are."
If someone is interested in specific city reports they can register on the website to automatically be notified when there is an update. That way when you subscribe to a page, you are added to a mailing list.
The City of Elliot Lake Lake is also updating its Facebook pages. That work should be completed in the next two weeks. On their side, IT people will be collecting feedback from the public with a view to making website improvements, as the process goes along.
The Elliot Lake Public Library site is accessible from the city website. There's also a subsection for the Elliot Lake Fire Department. An Economic Development page lists available city-owned land and properties for sale. A new Tourism section is a vast upgrade over the old website as well.
There's also a space to download applications, forms and permit applications, find out more about garbage handling and recycling, learn about local jobs and see council webcasts and documents.
To see it all, please click here