Located at www.cityofchicago.org, this is the first update to the City's website in nine years - a site that now contains more than 3,500 pages. The new site was modeled after the Explore Chicago tourism site (www.explorechicago.org) that was launched last year and subsequently was named "Best Destination Website" by the North American Travel Journalists Association.
"We knew that our job was to use the most up-to-date technology to create a website that makes it a simple task for Chicagoans to connect with their government online and find the information they need to help them with their every day lives," said City Chief Information Officer Hardik Bhatt during a website demonstration at the Daley Center today.
Even with a brief perusal of the site, some of the innovations stand out. The designers wanted to make the site "people-centric" rather than "department-centric" so that both individuals and businesses could find information quickly and conveniently. One sees the result of this approach in such things as access to information through various roles or hats, for instance.
If one is a business or professional, for example, as well as searching by general topic or department, one can also find relevant information under categories such as:
* Artists & Entertainers
* Caregivers
* Contractors
* Cultural Organizations
* Developers
* Educators
* Existing Businesses
* Food Service Establishments
* Health Professionals
* MBE/WBE/DBE
* New Businesses
* Non-Profit Organizations
* Retail Establishments
* Social Service Providers
* Trades
* Vendors
"We know that people want information in the many different formats available today and it's our job to make it as easy for our users as possible to interact with city government," explained Bhatt.
Other things they were going for include seamless interaction with other government websites and multimedia functions that would let citizens interact with the site with video options, automatic electronic updates and social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.
According to Bhatt, one key reason for the update was that aging infrastructure of the old city website could no longer support this site's rapid increase in demand. These days the website has more than one million visitors a month. And over the last three years, the number of payment transactions made online has grown from 240,000 to more than 600,000.
However, Bhatt also noted that the website improvements are another step toward the City's goal making Chicago government more accountable, open and transparent. He points out that the updated site enhances the transparency of government in a number of ways, such as making it easy to find information about such things as city contracts and payments, budgets, Freedom of Information Act requests, Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and other kinds of other city data.
"Our goal is to make online interaction with city government fast, efficient and even enjoyable," added Bhatt.
