District of Sechelt : Website Help

The District of Sechelt employs about 45 employees who deliver a broad range of services to the more than 8,000 citizens of Sechelt - the website is one of those services.

Goals
The site will try to answer the most common questions and provide the most "asked for" information. We want to enhance the accessibility our citizens have to information about the services and the political processes that affect them. Unlike some other local governments, we encourage other organizations to promote the District's tourism and economic development. This frees us to concentrate on serving the people who live and work in Sechelt.

This website employs the use of several icons across the top of internal pages providing quick links to frequently updated information and useful features. Additionally, an in-depth search function and dropdown navigation menus have been employed to facilitate ease of use and help transfer users to relevant pages.

contact list : will transfer users to e-mail and telephone list for the District of Sechelt
help : takes users to a page with information about this website's development and goals
site map : hierarchical list of major website pages
print : will open a new window with a printable version of the page being viewed
updates : transfers users to a page with a full list of dated changes made to this website

File formats
Most of the information on the site is easily read with any web browser (minimum IE 4 or Netscape 4) without any add-ons. PDF files require Adobe Acrobat Reader to be installed on your computer; a free download from Adobe.

Design
The District of Sechelt website began December 1998 as an "in-house" project with Gerry Grognet designing version 1 of the site. In January 2001, a site redesign began under the direction of Sam Weller and through the work of Lisa Egeland and Mark Hiltz and resulted in version 2 which was released March 28, 2001. It was designed for fast loading pages with a common format.

The District website received an initial site re-design in the fall of 2002 and a subsequent restructuring of content early 2004. Through the direction of Martin DesRosiers, the diligent work and implementation of Lee McCulloch from bluefish, and help from various staff members, the site was transformed into a professional, clean looking website that sets a standard for smaller municipalities.

Maintenance
The site is maintained by District staff who create or convert documents for their part of the web site, and maintain the information. The lead person in each area is called an Internet Coordinator, and this person sometimes relies on the work of other employees to help with the workload. The goal of this approach is to create web site content that is owned by the people who provide the service and can best communicate their business to the citizens. Overall technical support for the web site is provided the District's Finance department.

Acknowledgement
The District of Sechelt would like to acknowledge the leading role the City of Vancouver has demonstrated in local government internet communications.