Politics & Government
Niles Website To Give Residents More Convenience
The village of Niles is moving to a website in which residents can pay bills and register for programs online.
Written by Pam DeFiglio
The village of Niles' website is getting a redesign, with an eye toward making it easier for residents to find information.
The redesign is planned to eventually include the ability to pay online, saving residents the trouble of having to mail the water bill payment, for example.
"It's going to add a lot more interaction," said Bill Shaw, manager of the village's MIS department.
He made his comments after the May 28 village board meeting, at which the board approved $64,920 to website design firm CivicPlus to analyze the village's needs, design and implement the website, train village staff in using it and provide followup support.
"It comes with new functionality, such as the ability to do forms, surveys and notifications," Shaw added.
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Once the new site is up and running, Shaw said the village would put in Phase 2, which would allow residents to pay bills, apply for garage sale permits and register for programs online.
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At the May 28 meeting, Trustee Chris Hanusiak asked who would put up content on the website, and Ross Klicker, economic development coordinator, said staff in each department would be trained to put up content on the content management system.
Shaw also said the site would be fast and reliable.
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"Our intention is to have CivicPlus host 90% of the site, so it will sit in their server banks, with redundancy and backup, that provides more speed than we can provide today," he said.
After the village board gave village staff the go-ahead at its March meeting to pursue the development of a new website, staff put out a request for proposals and got about a dozen inquiries from website design firms, Shaw said.
They chose CivicPlus because it has done websites for other suburban Chicago municipalities, has a representative in Chicago and came in under the budgeted amount of $70,000.
"It's a heck of a package with a lot of cool features," Shaw said of what CivicPlus is offering.
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