ENCINITAS — Encinitas is hailing its revamped website as a boon for residents who were looking for a simpler, easy-to-navigate experience when visiting encinitasca.gov.
The city launched the updated website earlier this month, with a soft launch that allowed for Google and other search engines to crawl the site.
It cost $40,000 and took over a year for the city to complete the project.
“Our city is always committed to providing accurate and timely information,” said Pauline Colvin, the city’s executive secretary. “What we tried to do with the new website was make it simple, easy to use and navigate, and we feel that we accomplished it with the new site.”
The city last updated its site in 2011, but over the years the website has become cluttered and difficult to navigate.
The home screen has a vastly different feel than its predecessor, which had various pull down menus and tabs that made it difficult to find information. The current home screen has 10 big buttons, clearly marked, which lead to other areas of the website.
“We wanted to give it a softer look and make it more intuitive,” Colvin said. “There is a common sense, logical approach to the navigation.”
The site also features “responsive design”: the web pages can detect the user’s screen size and orientation and adjust the layout accordingly for a more user-friendly experience regardless of whether the site is accessed from a personal computer, laptop or mobile device.
Another feature of the site that Colvin said is unique to the current version is its administrative ease. City department heads are able to update pages on the site much easier than with the previous site.
Additionally, since the city is hosting the website in-house, information technology staff can attend to outages much faster than before.
