Single Click Satisfaction

Ever have trouble finding the information you needed on Dobbs Ferry's village website?  That frustration should soon be eliminated. 

Dobbs Ferry's board of trustees unveiled their soon-to-launch, updated village website Tuesday, with the hopes of improving communication with and accessibility to the public.

Features of the new website include: an easily accessible calendar, a full village directory with complete profiles for each town employee, downloadable forms and documents, just to name a few. But the key feature of the new site will be a number of tabs on the left of the webpage from which visitors can easily access any village department or desired site page. The Board hopes the new site will be a vast improvement over the current one, which was quite obviously outdated and the source of numerous complaints in the past.

"The main reason for the new website is to get better communication to the public and allow people to search for the information they need," Marcus Serrano, village administrator, said. "The old website was not user friendly at all. You had to scroll all the way down to find things as we added them on. Now people can obtain the information they are interested in getting without searching the entire website. It will be easier to use for the public as well as for the employees of the village."

The term "user friendly" seems to be the mantra of the new website's creators. With a search bar and a "Commonly Asked Questions" tab, the new site will offer precise and fast solutions to visitors' problems and inquiries. Everything from important tax dates, to leaf-blower regulations, to garbage pickup schedules, to the agenda of the next Board of Trustees meeting will be a simple click away, they say. Gone are the days of aimless scrolling and scanning for one line of information.

"The old website kept everyone from having any kind of input," Catherine Kay, deputy mayor, said. "It was just very rough to navigate. It was one of those things that became obsolete and it needed to be updated."

The Board also hopes that the new site will reduce the number of anxious trips to the Village Hall residents often have to make.

"When people are building and they come in, even when it's just for a small addition, they have no idea what they need and they are just paralyzed by the paperwork," Kay added. "We're hoping this new website has more of a 'how to' aspect where they can download applications or whatever else they need. I think it looks great so far."

Serrano stated that the new website is about 90 percent complete, and that it would be available to the public in the very near future. He also stated that once up, the new site will be easily updated and expanded. An example: the Board hopes that very soon the public will be able to watch recordings of town meetings on the very same day they're held.

 "We want to keep building the website," Serrano said. "It's going to be a project that never ends."

The new website will take the place of the old one at www.dobbsferry.com.