The city has a new website. Take it for a spin.

City hopes the new site will be more user-friendly and transparent

The city of Sebastopol launched its new city website last Friday. Designed by local web firm Planeteria with a handsome video by Brown Barn Films, the site is meant to make information about the city more accessible to its citizens and to be easier to use than the old website.

“The reason that we did it is that we wanted to make our website more user friendly,” said Holly Hansen, the city’s communication consultant, who managed the project. “We wanted to make it easier for people to find stuff, and for it to be more detailed in terms of supplying more information, increasing transparency.”

Hansen is particularly fond of the Building and Development Projects page, which locates new developments on a Google map and gives residents information about where a given project is in the permitting and development pipeline.

“Another thing that's super cool—and that planning has been working on for a long time—is the permitting portal. So many of the permits that are in the planning department and the engineering department—those can now be all done online.”

The new design also tries to strike a more human note by featuring photos of city councilmembers and department heads right on the front page.

“We wanted to make it more personal to so when you see these people around town, it’s like, ‘Oh, that's our city planner’ or ‘That's our city manager.’ Those photos used to be on the interior pages, now they’re front and center.”

And there are more bells and whistles coming.

“A new thing that we're going to be launching after we're sure that things are running smoothly is that we're going to have alerts, so that then a person can sign up for a variety of subjects that they're interested in and anytime there's information added about that subject, they will receive an alert with a link to that page.”

“The old website was in dire need of change,” Hansen said, “both in terms of how it looked and its functionality. We also wanted to give staff greater control over publishing content.”

As a Wordpress site, the new website should be easy for city staff to update, but Hansen knows that keeping a site up to date is a challenge.

“It's gonna be a learning curve, of course, but we're trying to standardize everything,” she said.

The website, which cost $35,000, is still in soft-launch mode, and Hansen invites citizens to take it for a spin and provide feedback.

“There’s a little tab on the bottom right of every page that says ‘Send Feedback,’” she said. “We’d love to get people’s response. Knowing that this is a soft launch, we expect they’ll find things we’ve missed. Let us know.”

You can find the site here.