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.