Wilmette residents who fired up their computers on May 10 and went to the village’s website to pay bills or check for village news could have been excused for feeling confused when they got there, thanks to an extensive redesign launched that day.
The website’s new look, touted by village officials as flexible and user-friendly, no longer boasts its old gold and black color scheme or its previously print-heavy layout.
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Instead, visitors are greeted by a bright blue and white theme topped with a changing slide show of Wilmette scenes There’s also a prominent calendar of village meetings and events, and a simplified menu allowing users to pay bills, watch board meetings, get permit information and – eventually – even make online service requests.
According to John Prejzner, assistant to Wilmette Village Manager Tim Frenzer, the redesign of www.wilmette.com lets users access the site via their smart phones and tablets because it now adapts to different screen sizes.
Prejzner, who introduced the site to village trustees at their May 10 meeting, said the latest iteration is its third. Wilmette first launched a website in 1997 and redesigned it in 2009 to offer more resident services, he said.
E-Gov Link, the Ohio company behind the redesign, began work early this year, Assistant Village Manager Mike Braiman said. The project cost $10,800, less than the $12,830 that had been allocated for it in the 2016 budget, Prejzner said.
Braiman said one of the biggest changes is the addition of a community portal that allows users to type in any property address in town and get a range of information about that location, from tax assessments and area zoning, to village garbage schedules, political representatives, and voting information.
“Someone who uses it can find out what school district they’d be in if they were at that address, what days their garbage would be collected. It’s available 24/7. It’s also a great tool for people looking to buy into the community,” Prejzner said.
He and Braiman said E-Gov Link could create the portal, available by clicking on the “Property Information Online” link, because Wilmette is part of the Geographic Information System Consortium, often known as the GIS Consortium. That group of Chicago communities pools resources so that each community can get access to and make use of geographically connected data, and that’s what powers the portal, Braiman said.
The village also updated the site’s video streaming capabilities so visitors can watch live or archived village, park district and school district meetings on more browsers, Braiman said.
Revamp work will continue over the next few months with the addition of a service request program. That will allow residents and businesses to request services, and ensure that the request gets properly routed to the right department or official, Prejzner said.
He and Braiman said that program will also be helpful for village officials, since it will allow them to spot patterns and types of requests, identifying problems and solutions as they do.
“It allows managers to track and make sure the requests are being handled in a timely manner, and when we integrate that process with the GIS information, we have a new tool,” Braiman said.
“For example, if someone has had missed garbage pickups, and they put in service requests, we’ll be able to see if there’s a pattern of missed garbage pickups in certain locations. If there is, we can talk to (the village’s contracted garbage hauler) and see what we can do to solve the problem,” Prejzner said.
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