Council web searches improve
Using the Internet to get
information and service from
Christchurch City Council is
becoming more and more popular
and the eCouncil unit has made
changes to improve most searches. The eCouncil team is responsible
for the development and
maintenance of the Council’s
website. “Making it easy to access
information and do business with
the Council using the web to save
time and lower costs is the vision of
the eCouncil project,” says its
manager Simone Pearson. Until the latest change, people
searching the Council’s site —
through www.ccc.govt.nz — tended
to get bogged in the huge mass of
archived Council agendas and
reports of meetings. “We made the change because we
had a lot of people saying they were
having trouble finding what they
were looking for,” Ms Pearson says.
“What we’ve done is taken those
agendas and proceedings files out of
the first search. “If, for instance, you type in
Colombo Street and hit the search
button, you’ll get maybe 10 up-todate
hits. Under the old search, it
would search all the old agendas
and proceedings and would come
back with more than 400 hits, which
was very frustrating. “Now what it does is bring back
fewer results but they will probably
include what you’re looking for.”
Searchers who wish to go deeper
can still do so. The Christchurch City Council’s
libraries have terminals on which
people can view all the City Council
websites. |