Clarendon Hills is working on a refresh of the village’s website aimed at making it easier for residents to find information and received village services online.
Assistant Village Manager Zach Creer and Executive Assistant Vicki Pries continue to work with Civic Plus on the yearlong project of refreshing/redesigning the village’s website, Village Manager Kevin Barr said.
“Earlier this month, they worked on finalizing the content currently on the website, to be sure it is current and correct,” he said.
Creer said part of the village’s contract with Civic Plus is an annual meeting to determine when a refresh is appropriate. CivicPlus is a web development company that specializes in building electronic government communication systems.
“We made the determination this year that enough has been upgraded with the service to merit a refresh,” Creer said. “Particularly, back-end tools have improved, which should make some of the updates more fluid and allow for more online service offerings to residents.”
Work on the refresh is ongoing, with just a few meetings taken place so far, an internal review process with the village’s customer service staff, a review of current content and a review other municipal websites for ideas, Creer said.
“Accessibility improvements include offering new automatic translation service by Google directly on our website for our non-English speaking website visitors, putting the information visitors most want in prominent locations, and improving some of the landing pages for water payments and police department pages, where we offer a lot of services but it takes many clicks to find,” he said.
Creer said it will take several months to complete the website refresh.
He also said every year the village tries to enhance services offered online, including block party applications, freedom of information requests, permits, licensing, service requests, payments, overnight parking, overweight vehicle registration, crash reports, vehicle stickers and water billing.
Also, transparency improvements, as the village maintains a publicly accessible database of nearly every village public record, and features that actively notify residents when new information has been posted on topics of interest.
“We believe we have gotten to the point where nearly every routine village interaction can be completed online and most more complex requests can at least get a good start,” Creer said. “These processes route automatically to the village employees to start working on the request and allow residents to track progress and get updates. But, as we have added features over the years, a refresh provides an opportunity to better organize the information and take time to see what visitors are actually using and looking for.”
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Creer said the Clarendon Hills business community has been engaged via the Clarendon Hills Chamber of Commerce on ways the village can help provide information about local businesses and improve their standings on search engine results.
Chuck Fieldman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.