Saturday, September 7, 2024
Hood County residents can now look forward to a digital upgrade as county officials finalize preparations to launch a new and improved county website Wednesday, July 24.
During a special meeting of the Hood County Commissioners Court June 11, the court reviewed the county’s proposed new website to make necessary changes before its official launch date.
As the topic was discussed, Precinct 2 Commissioner Nannette Samuelson stressed the importance of the website by calling it the “face of the community.”
"This is what everyone sees when they go to the website of Hood County, so I thought we should take a look at it and make sure that it looks good,” she said.
The commissioners “walked through” the pages of the site together as a resident would do if trying to find information about the county. The court discussed the pros and cons of the current site while viewing each page in order to address where improvements needed to be made.
Hood County’s Assistant Chief of Information Technology Owen Curnutt explained that the home page of the new website is important and will allow residents to navigate to each county department easily.
“One that is very near and dear to you, Nannette, is going to be the agenda center,” Curnutt said, adding that the new search feature will allow residents to find certain agenda topics much faster and easier than before.
“With the old one, the searching wasn't really good, so when you searched, it really only brought up the title of the document into consideration; it never really worked well,” he said. “But with this one here, we can see (a search result) that's come up often was Wolf Hollow, so now if we search for Wolf Hollow, we're getting 109 results. That’s definitely going to be a lot nicer for anybody trying to do their homework. (They will be able to) go back and look at what was said and what was done at last court and what was on the agenda minutes. This will make it easier for them to do that.”
The court did not take any action June 11 but decided to push the launch date back to allow Curnutt to continue modifying the website. Once the issues were resolved, the plan was for IT to request the approval of the commissioners to “go live” on the website during the July 9 court.
“After the workshop that we had, we went through and made all of the changes that were requested of us,” Chief Information Officer Drew Wiederkehr said during Tuesday’s meeting. “There were a few emails from Commissioner Samuelson of other changes that needed to be made, and those were all made, so really, we’re just looking for the green light to go live.”
“I also asked several people outside of the county to just take a look at it and see if they saw anything (that needed to be changed),” Samuelson said. “I got really good feedback that they liked it much better than our old website. (They said) it was easy to navigate, and they could find things they needed. I think it looks great.”
Following a short discussion, Samuelson made a motion to establish July 10 as the date to direct the IT department to make hoodcounty.tx.gov the primary URL for the county, as well as implement an auto redirect to the new site.
Precinct 3 Commissioner Jack Wilson seconded the motion and it passed unanimously.
According to Wiederkehr, the website will officially go live two weeks from July 10, which will be Wednesday, July 24.
