Sierra Madre Launches New City Website

A project more than one year in the making was recently unveiled to the residents of Sierra Madre in the form of a new official website for the city.

Working with the web developer, Services Director Toni Buckner headed up the project to transition the city to the new site. Just days ahead of the official transition, Buckner gave a presentation to the City Council where she gave a virtual tour of the new site’s appearance, departments and capabilities.



“Ideally a city website, when a person would want to use something, they would find what they want, when they want it, without any barriers and no difficulties,” Buckner told the council and audience at the June 14 meeting. “But whenever we use people and we mix them with machines... we occasionally go through a few blips and so we sometimes make a few compromises.”

Buckner cited several primary goals that were kept in mind when developing the new site. Those include improving “to improve communication with the community.”

To that end, Buckner cited the event calendar, feeds from the city’s email “blasts,” and Twitter accounts, as well as the addition of interactive PDF forms. Those forms are no able to be filled out directly on the site, rather than having to be printed off and completed by hand.

As for improving the user experience, Buckner said they had invited community volunteers to take part in a focus group on the navigation and search functionality of the site. Buckner said this provided the city with valuable feedback that was used in moving forward with the site design.

An entirely new feature of the site is the integration of online transactions between residents and the city. This means that the site has been linked to the city’s internal point of sale software to allow residents to pay their through the site using there credit or debit cards.

The template used in developing the cite also include functionality dedicated to better presenting the site’s content on mobile devices such as smart-phones and tablet computers.

That template site atop version 1.6 of the “Joomla” content management system, something which Buckner said was done in an effort to reduce ongoing costs.

“We wanted to maintain low annual costs [and] we did that by using the open source software and also the process of going through this [which includes] training other employees going forward... will increase technical skills on our staff,” Buckner said.

Open source is a term used to describe software that is developed over time in a cooperative and collaborative manner. Most open source software is free to the user, instead of being copyrighted by the for-profit software developer. Joomla is a very popular open source content management software, with more than 21 million copies having been downloaded as of February 2011, according to Joomla’s developers.

In all, the new site design cost Sierra Madre taxpayers less than the full $4,000 previously allocated for the project. A full account of the software used and expenses incurred in the project is .

View previous city staff reports by clicking here.

So far, the site has been received well by community members like Sierra madre resident Linda Mann who told Patch in an email how delighted she was with the new design.

“I just came across it today when I clicked on my bookmark to our library,” Mann said. “It is an incredible improvement, clean and fluff-free, and with a wonderful new comprehensive search feature for the library.”

The new site is now fully implemented and can be accessed at the city’s same domain as before, www.cityofsierramadre.com.