The site, inexplicably, was not developed by a local vendor, but by Revize, a company in Troy, Mich., under a contract let when Dean Maxwell was Mayor. The site cost about $6,500, plus an annual fee of $3,600 for hosting and maintenance, according to City Finance Director Steve Hoglund.
I’m not going to try to review the new site, but… I did find some problems, mostly with Search.
The new site has easy access to a meetings calendar, reachable by clicking, on the front page, "View All Events" under the "Upcoming City Events" block or by hovering over the "Your Government" menu selection on the main page top menu and selecting "Meetings / Calendar." While you can view City Council meeting schedule here, you cannot see the agenda here.
To view the City Council agendas, you must hover over the "Your Government" choice on the page top main menu and select "Officials / Council," then click on "Agendas," then click on "2014," to find the agendas. For those residents who try to follow Council activities, the online packet, which contains the documents for each Council meeting, is now a single huge PDF file. For example, the packet for Monday night's meeting is 92 pages. Previously, the packets were available separately for each agenda item.
Don’t bother the search function… at least not yet… When I tried to use the Search Our Site function for Agendas, the search results looked good, but, the top item, City Council Agendas, took me to a relatively unfriendly error message which said, “404- File or directory not found. The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”
Searches for “Community Visioning” and “Comprehensive Plan” yielded similar results.
Oddly, too, most search results are topped with advertising from Google. Searching for “Comprehensive Plan” displayed results for exactlycorp.com, wow.com, amazon.com, info.com, lookany.com and dandb.com.