New city websites to go live in a year

City council may soon spend $477,915 on a new city website - plus similar-looking ones for the library, the Memorial Centre and Peterborough Housing Corporation - that won’t be ready for at least a year. At a general committee meeting on Monday, councillors voted with no debate or discussion to hire a Waterloo firm, eSolutions Group, to redesign the sites at a cost of $289,375. But that’s not the full cost of the project. A new city staff report states that there are additional costs too, such as:

City staff time to convert website content for use on the new sites: $90,000

Contingency (for extra features the city may want; a complementary mobile app may be added too): $50,000

General contingency: $25,003 Software, vendor fees: $18,125 HST: $5,412

That brings the total cost to $477,915, which is more than the $425,000 council had previously budgeted for the project.

But because the library and Peterborough Housing Corporation will get new sites, their boards will be asked to contribute in order to make up the difference.

Meanwhile the city didn’t seek competitive bids for the contract: staff is recommending a co-operative purchase with Peterborough County, which recently used eSolutions Group to design the county’s new website.

The county held a competitive bidding process a bit more than a year ago, states the city staff report, and got 12 bids, with eSolutions scoring highest. As the city prepared to solicit bids for the redesign of its website, staff learned that eSolutions Group has already designed and built sites for more than 300 municipalities (including Guelph, Waterloo, Stratford and Brampton).

Eight city staffers met with officials from eSolutions and were impressed.

The city’s current website is more than 10 years old and contains about 1,000 pages that must be redesigned and reorganized, states the city staff report.

The new site is expected to allow citizens to complete online surveys, make payments or fill out application forms (for marriage licences, for example). The site is also going to be mobile-friendly.

It’s expected to take at least a year to complete the website and go live with it, the staff report states.

NOTE: See more city council coverage on Pages A1 and A2.