Administration with the Town of Osoyoos said they’re thrilled about the town’s upgraded website and response from the public has been overwhelmingly positive to the changes.
“It’s pretty exciting for us and we’re very pleased with the changes because we believe it’s a much better website,” said chief administrative officer Barry Romanko.
“We’re also excited by the fact all of these positive changes were done in-house … and only cost us $4,900, which is very cost effective when you consider many other communities have upgraded websites that range in cost from $30,000 up to $100,000.
“We’re getting very good response from the citizens of Osoyoos.”
Town employee Donna Core deserves a lot of the credit for taking a leading role in improving the website, said Romanko.
Upgrading the town’s website was part of administration’s business plan back in 2012 and the majority of changes were implemented to the town’s website the second week of May.
There are at least a dozen changes that staff feels are a dramatic improvement from the previous website, said Romanko.
Some of those include a new home page featuring more attractive photographs of the town that rotate on a regular basis, the ability to have all information provided on the website translated into the language of your choice, the ability to change the size of text for the visually impaired and a share page that allows information from the website to easily be transferred to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, said Romanko.
The various information tabs are also more contemporary and a banner tab under the heading “I Want To” allows viewers to input what they are searching for and get instant access to that information, he said.
Visitors to the website can also be notified by email of any updates to the current news being provided and a feature called “Osoyoos listens” allows visitors to provide requests for services or requests for information from town staff.
There is another feature where visitors are asked to participate in a poll on a topical issue in the community, said Romanko.
There is also an updated calendar of events that will inform visitors of what’s going on in town and what is coming up should they be planning a visit to our community, he said.
The site map also provides much more information about the town and lists key features in the community alphabetically, he said.
There are also links to other key organizations in town such as Destination Osoyoos and the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS).
“Overall, we think we’ve made some significant changes that have really spruced up the site and we’re providing a lot more tools and valuable information that visitors to the website can use,” said Romanko. “We have a new tracking system that indicates the number of hits that we get each day and we’ve already seen a significant increase in users to the website since we completed most of the upgrades.
“This is still a work in progress and there are more features that we plan on adding, but most of the work has been completed and we’re very happy with it.”
For those who haven’t seen the numerous changes to the town’s website, you can go online and visit www.osoyoos.com.
