South Hadley’s website gets new look with mobile users in mind

SOUTH HADLEY — Town officials launched a redesigned town website on Friday to increase accessibility on mobile devices and draw attention to services used most often by site visitors.

The site’s biggest changes are on the front page. A menu of commonly used resources including agendas and minutes, forms and online payments moved from the side of the screen to below the main photo. The buttons are enlarged and easier to view on a mobile device.

“We really wanted to make the site more mobile friendly, as well as streamlining and enlarging the buttons on the front page to reflect the services people are looking for the most,” Town Administration Lisa Wong said.

Part of the town’s contract with government technology company CivicPlus includes refreshes to the website every couple years. Over the past year, Wong and Assistant Town Administrator Kristin Maher researched other websites and pinpointed the best attributes to bring to South Hadley’s site. Wong added that this is the first of several alterations coming to the website.

“We still have a lot more work to do to update and upgrade additional pages,” she said. “One of the major changes in the next few weeks will be to add a projects page so that residents can see all of the different public projects in the works in one place.”

The Town Administration office looks for feedback on how easy it is to locate information and identity anything missing. So far, Wong received mostly positive feedback on the website. The few problems with links carrying over have been fixed, she said.

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.