Stockbridge website to get new look

STOCKBRIDGE – As other towns around The Berkshires have drastically updated their web presence and made their sites more user friendly, the Stockbridge town site had fallen behind.

Seeing that issue, town resident and Berkshire Regional Hills School Committee Member Richard Bradway stepped up and offered to redesign the site and make it far more up-to-date.

“I wanted to look at the content on the site, and what is not on the site that we want there and decide how it should be organized,” said Mr.  Bradway.

Mr. Bradway was able to bring his expertise – he is the associate director of ecommerce and new media for the Boston Symphony Orchestra – to the design of a whole new site for the town, and he offered to do it for free.

The new site will be launched in the coming weeks and will be available for residents to use before town meeting.

The redesigned site has a cleaner look and easy tabs across the top to guide residents to whatever information they are looking for. The top section also features a very detailed searching feature within the site.

The new website will also feature a new calendar, run through Google, which is easier to update and keep up to date. On the new calendar, events will also be highlighted in different colors by topics to make the calendar easier to search.

“I think these colors are helpful,” said Selectwoman Deborah McMenamy.

The website also includes easier access to online bill payments and forms and has been optimized to make the site easier to use from mobile devices and smartphones.

“If I was a town resident, I believe that this is what I would want to see,” said Mr. Bradway.

He also designed the website to make it easier to be updated. Currently, the town has to go through outside vendors to have their site updated. With this new, more user-friendly design, town staff can easily update the whole site and all of its features from town hall.

“Before we go live, I will show the staff more [of the administrative features of the site], but it is really easy to use,” said Mr. Bradway.

He explained the training of town staff still needed should take less than an additional hour, and once they were trained, he expected the site to be kept up-to-date.

“In return for getting a free website, I will be on top of you to make sure it is updated,” joked Mr. Bradway.

Posted by Kameron Z. Spaulding on March 28, 2013. Filed under Community News,News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry