Visitors to Kosciusko County’s website, kcgov.com, might be surprised at the new, fresh look recently completed.
The homepage now has drone shots of various landmarks and events, and is much easier to navigate than its predecessor.
The revamped site went online Tuesday.
Chasity Sandy, the geographic informations systems coordinator for the county, said that other than making the site mobile-friendly about three years ago, it had been a long while since any kind of update had been made. She said the goal was to not only make the site more appealing to the eye, but to make it much more user friendly.
“We have a company we work with, E-gov Strategies, that usually checks in with us every three to four years to ask, ‘Is there anything we can do for you? Is there anything out there that you’ve seen that you like?’ and so forth,” Sandy said.
“We had already started to feel like our site needed to be updated, about the same time they got a hold of us. They showed us some functionalities they have and gave us a list of counties they had done, and told us to take a look and let them know what we think.
“Immediately, we found several things we liked about different sites; the look, the feel, stuff like that. So that kind of started the whole process a little over a year ago.”
But the process was much more involved than just taking a bunch of pretty pictures and posting them.
“We did a lot of different data placements with this one,” said Sandy. “We really tried to drill down and get the data right there in front of the user verses several clickings to get where you wanted to go. We really tried to do a lot of coding with our wording in a lot of different areas, so if someone does a search with one word, there’s a lot of different things that come up with that one word.
“There are several areas of the website with information for the user to either get their information to a department or apply for different things, whether someone wanted to get their property looked at or get a copy of a divorce decree. We’re looking toward building more forms into the site to where the user can interact easily with us instead of having to call in or come in.”
Sandy said the cost of the update to the county was about $7,500, plus another $2,000 for the drone video footage. She said video was shot over the course of a year, so it’ll update seasonally.
“We’re really trying to draw people into our county, give them a quick glimpse of what we have and what we offer,” Sandy said. “And maybe even try to get them to come for a visit. And we really do have a lot to offer in our county.”
