The City of Prince George launched a redesigned website on Tuesday.
The city started the project roughly a year ago, because Microsoft will no longer be supporting the city’s content management system (SharePoint 2013) in April 2023, a spokesperson for the city said in an email.
“The refreshed site is also more accessible than our 2017 version and is much more closely-aligned at launch with double-A WCAG 2.1 standards. This is important because municipalities like Prince George must comply with the province's Accessible British Columbia Act next year and digital/communications platforms like our website are services that will likely be required to meet accessibility criteria,” the spokesperson said. “The bulk of the visual/layout changes were made to ensure PrinceGeorge.ca is accessible-friendly.”
The project’s budget is $100,000. While not all the invoices are in, the actual cost of the project is estimated between $60,000 and $75,000, the spokesperson said.
“This was also not a full re-design to incorporate new features. Residents - especially our subscribers - will see some changes to the newsletters or notifications they receive, but the old website's existing feature sets remain in place,” the spokesperson said. “As with many technical launches of this scale, we're still resolving the sorts of problems that invariably creep up when attempting to integrate different platforms into a one cohesive service. The City thanks our residents for their continued patience as we work to resolve outstanding issues.”
The city selected Drupal for its new content management system through a request for proposal process. The new system is expected to be more flexible, easier to maintain and cheaper to customize than the other solutions.
