LATHROP – Opening any day now is a new and more inter-active web site for the City of Lathrop.
The new web site has been under construction for some time, with the old site concurrently playing host to the city’s cyber visitors.
When the new site is ready for its grand opening, the city will simply turn off the lights at the old site, to use City Manager Cary Keaten’s analogy, and walk across the street to Lathrop’s more modern and user-friendly cyber home.
The cost of this transition is “very minimal,” said Keaten, although the city invested $100,000 on the initial construction of the web site. Restructuring and expanding the web site has always been a goal from day one when the city launched a web address, he said.
City information technologist Tony Fernandes did most of the reconstruction work, and the only cost involved was the purchase of software needed to do that, Keaten explained.
The goal is to have “people do as much business online. There’s a lot of things that people can do online before they come in (to City Hall),” Keaten said.
The new web site is just one of several steps that will enable people to do online transactions thereby saving them time and money, he added.
The new site will contain more news about what’s going on in the city, plus synopses of staff reports which will have links that visitors can click on to get to the full staff reports, among other things.
“This is a big step for the city; we’re excited about it,” the city manager said.
The new and improved city web home could be launched as early as Wednesday, he said.
The city is also now part of the Twitter world but is still not quite ready for the more maintenance-intensive Facebook. Keaten said the city hopes to start in the spring its Facebook site. The service is already there but is currently inactive. There is so much work involved in Facebook which is why the site has not been kept up.
“Twitter is so much easier to manage than Facebook,” Keaten said.
When the city does launch its Facebook, it will become part of only a few cities that are, to date, part of that social networking site.
To get to the new restructured and improved city web site, just log on to the city’s old web address: www.ci.lathrop.ca.us/
The new web site has been under construction for some time, with the old site concurrently playing host to the city’s cyber visitors.
When the new site is ready for its grand opening, the city will simply turn off the lights at the old site, to use City Manager Cary Keaten’s analogy, and walk across the street to Lathrop’s more modern and user-friendly cyber home.
The cost of this transition is “very minimal,” said Keaten, although the city invested $100,000 on the initial construction of the web site. Restructuring and expanding the web site has always been a goal from day one when the city launched a web address, he said.
City information technologist Tony Fernandes did most of the reconstruction work, and the only cost involved was the purchase of software needed to do that, Keaten explained.
The goal is to have “people do as much business online. There’s a lot of things that people can do online before they come in (to City Hall),” Keaten said.
The new web site is just one of several steps that will enable people to do online transactions thereby saving them time and money, he added.
The new site will contain more news about what’s going on in the city, plus synopses of staff reports which will have links that visitors can click on to get to the full staff reports, among other things.
“This is a big step for the city; we’re excited about it,” the city manager said.
The new and improved city web home could be launched as early as Wednesday, he said.
The city is also now part of the Twitter world but is still not quite ready for the more maintenance-intensive Facebook. Keaten said the city hopes to start in the spring its Facebook site. The service is already there but is currently inactive. There is so much work involved in Facebook which is why the site has not been kept up.
“Twitter is so much easier to manage than Facebook,” Keaten said.
When the city does launch its Facebook, it will become part of only a few cities that are, to date, part of that social networking site.
To get to the new restructured and improved city web site, just log on to the city’s old web address: www.ci.lathrop.ca.us/
