Politics & Government

Oak Lawn Website to Receive 'Well-Overdue' Makeover, Bury Says

By Mary Kate Brogan

Oak Lawn residents can expect a refreshing change to the village’s website within the next year, following a village board decision to redesign the government site to make it more user-friendly. 

Mayor Sandra Bury says that while the current website isn’t bad, it could be a lot better.

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“Have you tried to get any information on it?” Bury says of the site. “It’s okay to browse, but when you have two minutes to get information, there’s no searching, it’s not logically laid out in any particular order, it’s hard to find documents.

“If you look at a logically organized municipal website, it’s easy to find information, and our residents deserve that.”

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At the June 11 village board meeting, the board approved the web redesign proposal of Vision Internet, a company that specializes in government website design. The redesign will most likely be live in eight to 11 months.

Bury says that with this redesign, members of each department will be able to control their own webpages instead of going through a web designer. This will make connecting residents with different village departments easier.

“Imagine if you had a house on your block that wasn’t kept up,” Bury says. “You could just send a work order without leaving your home, without going to village hall, finding out who to talk to, the intimidation of not knowing.”

While the current site costs the village $3,000 per month in maintenance fees, the new website will cost the village $508.33 per month, with a five percent increase every year for four years. The redesign itself will cost no more than $51,800, according to Tom Swaw of the village’s IT department.

The new site’s features may include discussion pages for residents and a business directory for the village. In the past, businesses had to pay several thousand dollars to get an ad on the Oak Lawn site, but Bury says she wants to make it simpler.

“If people want it to be a pumped-up directory with their business information a little more finessed, let them put the work in,” she says, “But I don’t think they should pay thousands of dollars.”

Bury says the village board welcomes any feedback residents may have about the new site.



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