NEWBERRY — Residents of Newberry as well as visitors to the area will now see a revamped and improved version of the city of Newberry’s website, according to Scott Sawyer, director of Parks, Recreation and Tourism for the city.
The new website went live July 13.
The design and look of the new website is new and different than the previous cityofnewberry.com site, Sawyer said. The color scheme follows the logo that the city currently uses.
Waypost Marketing in Greenville (WaypostMarketing.com) designed the new site and Sawyer said it is considered a “responsive site,” meaning it is optimized for all devices allowing for easier navigation throughout the site on computers, tablets and other portable devices.
All of the content on the visitnewberrysc.com website was rolled into a new cityofnewberry.com website, Sawyer said.
The city kept its visitnewberrysc.com domain name and this will become a landing page within the city’s site after the revamp.
Cityofnewberry.com will be main web page, with the others housed in it. There will be event landing pages within the site as the city has domain names for Oktoberfest, Irish Fling, etc., so now these will become landing pages within the city’s site.
“There is a lot of content on the new site with the two sites merged and staff hopes to keep it updated and fresh as often as possible,” Sawyer said.
Another feature to help keep the community and visitors up to date Sawyer said is the “live” feed to the city’s Facebook page. The most recent Facebook posts will appear on the new site on the home page. The city does not have a Twitter account, Sawyer said, but Mayor Foster Senn does and there will be a link on the home page of the new site to the mayor’s Twitter page.
The home page will also include a link to the city’s YouTube channel. Although the channel is fairly new, Sawyer said they hope to use it in the future to post event information as well as some public service videos.
While some of the event information should appear when the website goes live, a good bit of information will be populated by staff over the next couple of weeks, Sawyer said.
City staff will be receiving training on working with the content management system for the new site, Sawyer said. However, the uploading of some documents has been put on hold to add to the new site.
“If citizens are looking for something and don’t see it right away, it will likely be added within a week,” Sawyer said. “Otherwise they are free to call and we will get it loaded.”
City staff will have an admin log-in to upload documents that are needed and will have the ability to go into the site and edit information as needed.
Why a new site?
Sawyer approached City Council in January about amending the 2014-2015 fiscal year budget to provide funds for the website.
Both the cityofnewberry.com and visitnewberrysc.com websites were created more than six years ago and were in need of design and software updates, Sawyer said.
The overwhelming amount of mobile traffic to the city’s webpages, Sawyer said was one of the deciding factors to the website revamp.
Over 70 percent of traffic to cityofnewberry.com was from mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, iPads, but neither page was optimized for mobile device users.
The largest age group of people visiting the site were between the ages of 25-34, with more males than females.
This information was obtained via Google Analytics.
Sawyer said online visitors consistently come from the Charlotte and Atlanta areas. The City Services page was also found to be visited more than any other.
For the website to the functional for the greatest number of users, Sawyer said they realized they needed to look at making the site responsive.
The updates will add a measure of security, Sawyer said along with an annual cost savings of $960.
Assistant City Manager Matt DeWitt said the cost to update the website was between $18,000 and $19,000, with the money being appropriated from this year’s budget. The money, DeWitt said comes from cost savings throughout the year association with other city projects.
“The newly revamped city website should provide an enhanced user experience for it’s visitors on whatever device they may be using, and we felt this was an important feature with near 70 percent of our website’s traffic reaching us through mobile devices,” DeWitt said.