Grand jury members looked at Napa County’s Information Age headquarters – its website – and decided the place needs sprucing up.
While not agreeing with every conclusion in the 2015-16 grand jury report, county officials plan to make changes. People using the website should see the results sometime next year.
“The website is a key way we communicate with the public and we have to meet their needs,” county Public Information Officer Kristi Jourdan said on Monday.
From January through May, the county’s website was used an average of 57,336 times a month, county Webmaster Mehgan Ragan said.
Grand jurors went to the county’s web address of www.countyofnapa.org. Seventeen county departments and various county divisions, from planning to the tax collector to health, can be found there.
But the grand jury concluded that people too often must go to the county’s brick-and-mortar headquarters to schedule inspections or file applications. Its report said that various other counties make more Internet transactions available.
An unnamed county manager quoted in the grand jury report said it’s better to have customers online than in line.
Plus, the grand jury concluded that the county tucks some of its 250,000 virtual documents away in hard-to-find nooks of its online headquarters. For example, the grand jury had trouble finding the county’s 2013 Performance Measure report.
The website needs a better search engine, the report said.
Napa County will soon be seeking bids for new content management software. It will also be working on a website redesign. All of that means that the county’s website will be evolving.
But whether the revamped website will offer more online applications and payment options is unclear. Doing so can require changes to a department’s work flow, policies and procedures, the county’s grand jury response said.
That means departments must evaluate whether an online service will bring value to customers and staff and that it is sustainable, the response said.
The revamped county website will have an improved search function, county Library Services and Community Outreach Director Danis Kreimeier said. It will also be formatted in such a way that the county can more easily remove dated materials.
Ragan said the county will look at what other counties are doing as it moves ahead with the website redesign. But government doesn’t always set the highest website bar. The county will also look at private enterprise, she said.
While the public will have to wait until next year for the website changes, it can already make use of one new feature. A “live chat” bar on the county’s home page allows people to ask questions over the Internet to a live person about county functions.
Ragan called the feature a virtual reference desk. The “live chat” bar is blue when somebody is available to answer questions and gray when nobody is available. The public can use the gray bar to leave a message.
Napa County’s website audience has various skills and needs for information, the county grand jury response said. The goal of the website is to serve this diverse audience.
“This is an obtainable goal,” it said, but will require dedicated countywide resources to maintain fresh and relevant content and online services.
Even when the county debuts its revamped website next year, the website evolution won’t be finished.
“It’s never done,” county Chief Information Officer Jon Gjestvang said.
June 21, 2016
Napa Valley Register
By Barry Eberling
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