New River Forest Website Debuts

Instead of cluttered and scattered, clean and simple.

That's the idea behind the village of River Forest's new website, which debuts Monday.

The new site employs a new behind-the-scenes function where village officials can log-in and update the site themselves. (Previously, they needed to e-mail a "third-party and hope [they were] at the computer," said village administrator Eric Palm.)

That's key to cost savings, because many pre-packaged municipal websites, with their cookie-cutter designs and rigid, proprietary content management systems, can cost upward of $50,000, Palm said.

But the renovated River Forest website will use a free content management system called Joomla. The bulk of the roughly $11,000 cost for the new website, officials said, comes from hosting and network maintenance, the latter of which is shared with the Village of Oak Park.

And while the website will be easier for certain village employees to update and maintain, it's the users who will see the most benefit. Gone is the labyrinth of pages and sub-pages.

Instead, you'll find three main drop-down categories: for residents and prospective residents, for business owners and for government functions. Each category contains a wealth of options tailored to the user — think pet licenses and parking information for residents; permits and licenses for businesses.

Some users might find one of the new pages among the most refreshing: Direct phone numbers for village employees. And in a nod to transparency, the site houses a one-stop spot for Freedom of Information Act requests, budgets, payments made by the village to various vendors, and contracts with its labor unions.

The site also offers a few new features, including a payment center for parking tickets, ordinance violations and vehicle stickers, a live chat function and a new calendar for civic meetings. The ability to add more community wide events to the calendar may be added in "version 2.0," Palm said.

Launching in conjunction with the new website is the official River Forest app, which contains listings for local businesses, a phone directory for village hall, links to local news sources and Twitter accounts. It's available for free in the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace.

Among the app's more outstanding features allows users to photograph and report an issue, say, a pothole or graffiti. The app will detect through GPS the location of the issue and report it immediately to village officials.