Of the seven companies that put in bids to redesign the city of Prince George website, only one was located within city limits.
Splash Media was one of the six companies that submitted proposals for the project to not be selected.
The others were the Vancouver-based firms Graphically Speaking, Dead Famous, Hot Tomali and Hot Soup Media and Robert Half/Proviti, which is based in the U.S. but has a handful of Canadian offices, including one in Vancouver.
The successful bid came from eSolutions Group out of Waterloo, Ont.
"There's a lot of restrictions on why you can't specify a local company receive a large public contract," said city external relations director Rob van Adrichem. "So that's basically why we can't make a project like this only open to a Prince George company."
The $124,300 contract is projected to take about a year and a half and it's a large, complex job, van Adrichem said.
"This isn't just us sitting back and handing it to a contractor," he said. "There will be a whole public engagement process, there'll be a number of elements to this that will involve people from IT, from communications and departments like economic development, etc."
The city is trying to do two major things with princegeorge.ca, said van Adrichem: make it more accessible (by making information easier to find, adaptable to different devices, etc) and make it a more-effective tool for representing Prince George.
"That sounds kind of cliche but I think it's true in this day and age that your website is major part of how you present your community," he said. "I think we could benefit from improving that."
In the bid documents posted on BCBid, there are some examples of municipalities with web sites the city would be interested in emulating. These include the landing pages for Coquitlam, Nanaimo, Campbell River and Brampton, Ont.
The redesign also has to include an improved events calendar, GIS-based maps and self-service function where residents can do things such as pay bills and report potholes.
Part of the lengthy timeline is a public engagement and focus group component, said van Adrichem.
"I'd love to get it done earlier than what we had scoped," he said, "but I don't want to unintentionally constrain our ability to make this as good as we can."
