Seward launches new city website

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The city of Seward has launched a new website designed by the Nebraska Public Power District to make it more user-friendly and fix outdated things on the old one.

Derek Bargmann, City Clerk/HR Director in Seward, said the new website launched on April 12 and is still working out minor fixes.

“We wanted to make sure that we fixed any issues that we saw,” he said. “We went through initially and found some things that weren’t quite working right, so we’ve made those changes.”

One of the main differences on the new website is the homepage. Bargmann said the page is more user-friendly with the four main things people look for on it.

“You have the four main boxes which are paying your utility bill, accessing city (council) agendas, job openings and contact us,” he said. “We figured those are the four main things people were coming to our website to do.”

The site also has a drop-down arrow that says “How Do I” that answers the top 10 things asked the most. The list consists of how to sign up for city utilities, sign up for a recreation program, use the burn site or recycling center, visit Dowding Municipal Pool, watch a city council meeting and more.

“Our goal is to hopefully have them use those four boxes or use the how do I and then click on the link that they’re looking for,” Bargmann said.

Bargmann said the old website had a lot of things that distracted users from the goal of the city's website.

“It’s just getting our website to achieve what we needed, which is to serve the citizens and make sure they found what they were looking for in an easy way,” he said.

While trying to figure out what they wanted to do for the new website, Bargmann said they spent a lot of time thinking about how people access information on their website. He said they also used analytics on their old site to see what pages people were using and how they could make it easier to get to that information.

“So instead of having like three of four clicks to get to a piece of information, it’d be like one or two clicks,” he said.

The new website also takes less coding to change something.

“When we had the old site up, I had to go in sometimes and change code,” Bargmann said. “The new way of doing it is drag and drop. So it’s much easier not having to do coding stuff to make it work.”

A new thing on the new website is updated pictures. Bargmann said the photos on the old website were starting to get outdated.

“A website after so many years and the pictures and way it’s presented can start to get stale,” he said. “We want to make sure that we have something that represents the people here and makes it look good.”

The new home page for the website is Fourth of July themed, with some of the Revolutionary War reenactors doing the walk during the Fourth of July parade.

“We thought tying in a Fourth of July theme to our front page was crucial,” Bargmann said.

The website will continue to be at the same link as it was before, cityofsewardne.gov.

Although the website is completed, Bargmann said they are still working on getting some pictures and updates on the site.

“We’re still working on getting some headshots for the city council,” he said. “A lot of this has migrated over from the old site. However, we’re going to look at each page and make sure it’s up to date and keep that process going of making it more appealing to the eye.”

Bargmann said if anyone has any issues with the new site, they can call the city office at (402) 643-2928.

“Hopefully when people look at it, they’ll enjoy it and feel like it’s an improvement,” he said.