Those visiting the Comox Valley Regional District’s website will notice a fresh look, after the CVRD rolled out its new online management system on March 21.
Jennifer Steel, the CVRD’s manager of corporate communications, said the re-designed website will have a cleaner, simpler layout, with an improved search function that makes it easier to navigate than the previous site.
“We just wanted to make our information easier to access and more digestible for people. And our website is our number-one tool to communicate with the residents and the public,” she said.
Steel said one benefit of the site is its mobile compatibility. Site analytics showed that 46 per cent of the CVRD’s website visitors access the site through their cell phones or tablets.
The upgrades cost the regional district $47,000. Victoria-based digital marketing and communications agency Upanup Studios was commissioned to develop the new site.
“We’d received feedback both from staff, public, and the board that the [old] site was complicated to navigate, people couldn’t find things and our search functionality didn’t work,” said Steel.
The new site also combines some of the CVRD’s “sub-sites,” including the online portals for the Comox Strathcona Regional Hospital District, the North Island 9-1-1 dispatch, and the Comox Strathcona Waste Management board.
The last time the site was refreshed was in 2013, according to Steel.
“Since that time, there have been a lot of technological advancements in websites,” she said. “Typically, websites are refreshed and redesigned every five to seven years. We wanted to take in the feedback people had to make the information more clear.”
According to Steel, the regional district will promote the new site to residents through social media in the coming weeks.
The URL for the CVRD’s website is comoxvalleyrd.ca