New Year, New Website for Town of West Hartford

The Town of West Hartford celebrated the first business day of 2012 by launching its newly-designed website.

"Our primary goal was to give web visitors a feel for what the West Hartford community looks like," said Public Relations Specialist Renée McCue regarding the reason for redesigning the Town's website. The newly-designed home page features a scrolling slideshow of beautiful photos that shows off the "lively community," she said.

Photos grace not only the home page, but can also be seen as you dig deeper into the site, said McCue.

"We hope web visitors will also be able to more easily find what they're looking for," McCue said. The site has been reorganized into three main categories: Living Here, Doing Business and Visiting. There is also an “I Want To”  tab on the main menu bar, to make the search function for web visitors much more user-friendly.

Employees at every level of the Town's organization have been preparing for the redesign since June. "The information has all been freshened and edited," McCue said.

In addition, new content management software, created by Revize, LLC of Troy, Mich, will make it easy to keep the site current on a departmental level. There are now 42 web editors in the town – instead of just three – responsible for keeping the site up-to-date. Editing can also be done at any time, from any place that has an internet connection.

The cost for the website's redesign was $4,000, and the Town will also pay an annual hosting fee of $2,500. The last revison to West Hartford's website was in 2000.

West Hartford owns two domain names: www.westhartford.org and www.west-hartford.com.