Black Diamond residents are getting more in touch with their community following the release of the Town’s revamped website.
The Town spent the last several weeks updating its 10-year-old site, at town.blackdiamond.ab.ca, to make it more user friendly for residents, merchants and visitors. The new look was launched last week.
“This is a really big change,” said Verna Staples, the Town legislative services manager. “We want to make sure people get the most out of the website and make sure they are coming to the website for their local information.”
Staples said information from the previous site was updated, cleaned up and streamlined to make it easier to read.
Residents can now create an account and sign up for notifications about information ranging from community events to emergencies. Each participant, whether a resident or tourist, can choose to receive messages via text or email, she said.
“It gives them a chance to choose what they want to be involved with and choose to learn about a specific topic,” she said. “It really allows people to be informed at the level they wish to be informed and involved at the level they wish to be involved. People who day trip can choose to get a notification of our community events.”
The site will also be mobile device friendly, Staples said.
“It rearranges the information on small screens rather than shrinking the picture so you get everything on the same page,” she said.
Staples said the website consists of a menu bar with five topics that appear at the top of each page the user navigates.
“The bar never leaves so you don’t have to go backtracking like on the old website,” she said. “To return to the home page you just click on the logo.”
The site will provide information on areas such as town council, bylaws, an interactive map, as well as local businesses and services.
“When we created these tabs we broke it out into the way we felt people would look for information,” she said.
Staples said administration will keep track of users of the site and compile the information on a regular basis.
“It’s important to know how many people are using it, what are the hot spots, what is the information that people are going to most, what are they going to the least and what can we improve on,” she said. “If people are going to a specific space more than others we want to make sure that’s maintained and up to the minute.”
Staples said administration was unable to keep track of its website users in recent years as the site was too outdated.
“It wasn’t easy to do and it was very time consuming to try to make it work,” she said. “We did in the beginning. When that software was new those reports came to us easily. As the technology got old we didn’t do it.”
Town council approved $10,000 each year for the next four to cover expenses and ongoing maintenance.
“We are able to keep our website current this way,” she said. “The other one was outdated and difficult to manage. It was not user friendly anymore.”
While the Town still has a separate website for visitors at visitblackdiamond.ca, Staples said that information will eventually be added to the updated site over time so everything is on one site.
The Town will host three free public website demonstration sessions for citizens this month. They will take place at the Town municipal building Nov. 5 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and Nov. 12 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and at the Sheep River Library in Turner Valley on Nov. 5 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
