Official Oak Park Website to Get a Makeover

Pretty soon, navigating the official Village of Oak Park website won't be an exercise in frustration.

The village board recently approved an agreement with Evanston-based Breakthrough Technologies, LLC to oversee the development of a brand new municipal website.

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All told, the village will spend roughly $75,000 replacing the current site — layered with some 1,700 individual pages — with a cleaner, sleeker design.

Village officials prioritized an "intuitive and useful" navigational structure for the new site, complete with drop down menus for categories like parking, jobs, government, calendar listings with official events and most searched items.

"[On the current site] you have to peel those layers back to find information you're looking for and we're hoping to remove some of those layers and bring that information to the forefront," said village communications director David Powers

Part of the agreement with Breakthrough has the company building an actual content management system for the village. For more than a decade, the posting of all content fell to one employee, Powers. The new version will eventually allow other department heads to contribute.

"It really could be a tough administrative task just to keep up with the things that probably a lot of people weren't looking at but we had to do," he said.

Village officials are hoping to push out the new site by later this year or in early 2013.