Cedar Hill City Website Gets An Overhaul
September 7, 2007
By Brian Allen / Cedar Hill Today
City officials are well aware the city’s website leaves much to be desired. So much so that one of Public Information Officer Corky Brown’s first assignments was getting the site updated.
“It’s been a long, painfully slow process,” Brown said. But it’s a process that moved closer to completion with the council’s approval of CivicPlus to design a new city of Cedar Hill website. CivicPlus touts itself as a designer of “next generation government websites” and lists DeSoto and Midlothian among its clients locally.
CivicPlus also did the website for Frederick County, MD, which won first place in the 2007 Digital Counties Survey done by the National Association of Counties.
Frederick County’s Technical Projects Manager Sherry Weakley called CivicPlus an important part of the process.
“Our partnership with CivicPlus played a significant role,” Weakley said. “We couldn’t have done it without them. Through our new partnership with CivicPlus, our new citizen-centric website philosophy was realized. The website now has a consistent look and feel throughout and is centered on the needs of our citizens.”
That’s exactly what Cedar Hill is looking for.
“The site we have is in need of updating,” Brown said. “That’s been hard to do internally. We want to have something that will encourage communication to and from our community. It’s been a process of going through and deciding what we wanted to include.”
The council had set aside about $40,000 for the expenditure; the contract with CivicPlus is just over $35,000. Brown said city staff know how important websites are in this digital age. Thus, they’re eager for Cedar Hill to have a site that represents its progressive nature.
“To me, it’s the centerpiece of our whole communication program,” he said. “It should give that community feel and that’s been one of our problems. We want it to be something that is easy to access and we want citizens to feel comfortable in doing so. That’s very consistent with the way city staff view our jobs. As city employees, we feel like our job is customer service.”
Among the features Cedar Hill residents can look forward to with the new website are a highly functional search engine, a “How Do I Do This?” type feature on city services and a calendar with event dates.
Online bill paying is another feature Brown said citizens have wanted, and one the new website will be able to offer.
The new website should be ready to go live in December.
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Welcome!
My name is Wade Emmert and I am a Council Member for the City of Cedar Hill. This web site is a way for me to share with you some of my thoughts about issues important to the City.
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