Clarendon Hills has refreshed its village website with updated images, graphic buttons, vibrant colors, and new content.
But what village officials are most excited about is a new feature that allows users to select any of 133 languages when using the website.
“The most exciting part about our refresh is that we are more accessible to residents where English is not their native language,” Village Manager Zach Creer said. “Residents can click the select language button on the front page under the search button. The whole site can be translated into the language of choice.”
Creer said the 133 available languages on the website come from everything Google can translate. The idea to add additional languages came from staff, he said.
“It is helpful for some of our residents and visitors,” Creer said. “Particularly, the police department appreciated having it for some of their services. We have lots of Cantonese speakers, which sort of surprised me.”
Village staff began the process of refreshing the website in early 2023, Creer said, and had the updated site up and running at the beginning of September.
“CivicPlus, our vendor, made the changes based on staff input,” Creer said. “A refresh every four years was built into contract. We delayed for a bit, until they had new features.”
Clarendon Hills’ last annual contract renewal with CivicPlus came in June. The village pays $8,168 a year for a deal that includes the website, many of the forms/processes, an online complaint/work order system, emergency text system and agenda software.
“We updated accessibility, we added new language options, we did data analysis to see what people were looking for and try to bring that forward and make it easier to find,” Creer said. “We also updated most of the pages with modern content. We added new modules that will integrate the village code better with the website and search, and brought codification in-house at a significant cost savings.”
Creer said website design also was updated.
“And we also integrated the various online services we have introduced since the initial website, including online bill payments, overnight parking, business licenses, the transparency portal and many others,” he said. “We are basically all online now, including our documents archive back to the 1920s.
Creer said one exception of available online services is for circumstance for which village staff believe the process is complicated enough to warrant actual interaction with staff, such has zoning interpretations.
“Overall, our goal was to make it easier to find information people are looking for and for people to be able to do most village business online,” he said.
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Typically, residents use the village website for service requests, bill payment, building permits, overnight parking requests, setting up accounts/services when they move, looking up general information/news, and finding out when meetings are and what is going to be discussed.
Creer said the last significant change to the village website was in 2016.
“I think we were ahead of the curve,” he said. “Lots of other village’s websites look like ours now, but we were one of the first with a large picture, prominent search, and clean design.”
Creer said he and former Community Development Director Dan Ungerleider probably looked at hundreds of websites to find the right layout in 2016.
“At the time, having a website that was functional on a smartphone was the biggest goal,” he said.
Chuck Fieldman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.