The City of Lethbridge replaced its roughly two-decade-old website with the launch of a new modern and streamlined site. Residents can still find all the information they need on city operations at Lethbridge.ca, but it should now be easier to find what is needed.
Mayor Blaine Hyggen says the redesign trimmed the website down from more than 2,000 pages to just over 300. The change was something city council and officials have been looking at for a long time and council allocated $277,000 in the operating budget to complete the project.
“This is an exciting day—we have all been looking at ways to navigate through city services and different things that we have on our website and at time it has been challenging,” Hyggen says. “It takes a long time, there is a lot of information through the city. You look at every single meeting that we have had over the years and that is going to be stored, that history is going to be there so that we can access that and find answers to the questions that we might have.”
Wes Chapman is a communication strategist with the city who worked on the new website and says it is a starting point for future functionality. Part of the budget allocation is an online resident portal, which he says will allow users to customize the online dashboard to easily access services they need. He says this should launch in the fall.
Chapman adds the old website was organized by departments, but the new one is focused on ease of use for residents and is organized to make things easier to find.
“We did a lot of user testing over the last year or so, so with residents, with staff to try to figure out where people were going to look for things and we organized the website that way,” he says.