A new website for the city of Williams Lake is up and running and one of its creators is hoping it will be an improvement.
"I'm excited," the city's manager of information technology Thomas Chung said Friday. "We've tried to make it clean, simple and streamlined."
It's the city's third version of a website in a decade. The first one lasted six years, the second one about three, and this new one Chung hopes will endure.
Because new ideas and content can be added to it it can be built on.
"We can refresh it and keep it current," he said as he showed media the website during an orientation session Friday.
"This night time shot of Williams Lake was submitted by a local photographer," he said as a panoramic view of the lake graced the screen. There's another span of the golf course, the dock at Scout Island and one of the wooden biking structures on the new Snakes and Ladders trail system.
The "dashboard" people see on the screen contains six links. They include inside city hall, live, work, play, how do I? and my Williams Lake.
Chung and communications co-ordinator Ken MacInnis said the website also aims to engage the public.
"There's a place for the community to offer ideas and initiatives," MacInnis explained. "We've called that section community voice."
Another feature will save people time. Instead of having to download an entire document, people can simply choose a question, click on it and more information will appear.
"You can read one answer or all the answers. You'll have a choice," MacInnis said.
People can sign into the website and create a communication system of their own. If they want to receive certain updates regularly, they can.
Work on constructing the new website began about six months ago, with city staff working in partnership with CivicPlus a larger corporation that creates hundreds of websites in the US and in Canada.
The cost for the new website was about $25,000.