FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 18, 2010
CONTACT: Lindsley Smith
Communication Director
479-575-8328
[email protected]
TOP LOCAL GOVERNMENT WEBSITES IN THE NATION
The City of Fayetteville website http://www.accessfayetteville.org/ received national recognition as a top local government website in the nation by the encyclopedia and reference resource Juggle.com.
Lauren Taggart, an Awards Editor with Juggle, stated following a thorough review of over 3,000+ government portals, we have selected Fayettevilles official government website www.accessfayetteville.org, for our Top City Government Website Award. Our Awards Editors came to this decision after assessing your sites impressively rich information, useful services, and excellent visual design. Information regarding this award is detailed at: http://www.juggle.com/fayetteville-arkansas-top-city-government-website. Mayor Lioneld Jordan remarked, We worked hard in-house developing the website with an audience-centered and open-government focus, constantly working to assure that information citizens need is current, available, and easily accessible. As such, we incorporated community comments and recommendations as to what they needed and wanted into the new design and features of the website to work to provide citizens with the best portal to their government and a highly-effective community resource.
The Citys website has been greatly enhanced over the past year, and these many improvements were done in-house by City staff. The new website has received a great deal of praise for its enhanced usability. The City Council passed a resolution for the city to incorporate more social media elements in city communication, so Facebook, Twitter, a blog, and an RSS Feed were added. Frequently-asked questions with answers, an Avatar, and 10 one-minute videos that highlight Fayetteville were added. Cone Patrol tracks road projects or emergency situations The website can easily be translated into over 60 languages. Online citizen input opportunities and surveys have increased, document archives have increased, online utility payment was made more visible and easier, and the Government Channel has enhanced public information and web capabilities related to video (such as streaming online, live meetings of the City Council, and many video-related improvements). We also started using video links in the citys quarterly newsletter; and the use of social media, particularly Facebook, helps greatly in getting the newsletter to a wider audience economically. Moreover, citizens can register online for sports and camps and reserve park facilities such as park pavilions, playground areas, ball fields, and other amenities in our 72 public parks.
The most helpful advice for the citys new website design came from Fayetteville citizens, and we thank you for your input. We continue our efforts to improve e-government as we currently assess our technology capabilities for citizen self-service. With the online features, in keeping with open government guiding principles, the agendas of the City Council meetings provides easy access to all of the documents that the City Council reviews on each issue, and such documents are provided to citizens at the same time the City Council receives them. Also, if someone misses a City Council meeting and desires to see only a part of the meeting, to save their time they can go directly to the item on the agenda and pull up the documents and pull up that specific point in the meeting to immediately review the Councils and publics discussion on that agenda item. The online features for the Animal Shelter, such as online adoption or fostering forms and regularly-updated features on animals up for adoption, have worked to increase the number of loving homes for homeless dogs and cats.
We are constantly adding additional documents and records and positioning our city to recognize and embrace the changing environment of social media. We are looking at open-data-source capabilities so that citizens who want to use data collected by the city can use their own applications for their entrepreneurial, neighborhood association, residential, or other uses.
The City of Fayetteville has received many compliments about the website and continues to listen to citizens suggestions for making improvements. If you have suggestions for further strengthening the City of Fayetteville website, please contact Lindsley Smith, at 575-8330 or [email protected]. Please check out the City of Fayetteville website today at http://www.accessfayetteville.org/.
