Neepawa's new online presence

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Published on Thursday, January 12, 2017

Left to right: Director of finance and utilities Dalyse Robertson and economic development officer Marilyn Crewe show off the revamped www.neepawa.ca, which launched at the start of the year. The improved website was a collaborative effort between the town and Insightrix Research, a Saskatchewan based company.

The Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

A project that has been a year in the making has made its debut, as the town of Neepawa has launched its newly designed website. The revised, more user-friendly site replaced the previous one, which had been in use for the past decade. 

The new www.neepawa.ca was created through a collaborative effort between the town and Insightrix Research, a Saskatchewan based company focused on online marketing and website development. Neepawa’s economic development officer Marilyn Crewe said that of the 16 companies who bid on the project, Insightrix presented the town with the best and most comprehensive vision. 

“One of the reasons that we chose to work with Insightrix was because they included market research in the development phase. They developed various templates for the website and sent them out to people to test the usage. So there was no guesswork as to whether a layout was correct. We knew from the research what people liked, what worked and what was seamlessly accessible.”

Director of finance and utilities Dalyse Robertson said that one of the first things many people will likely notice about the new site is that it’s much more mobile friendly. Crewe said that was a conscious choice by the town, because research indicates that more and more people do the majority of their browsing online through their phone or tablets, as opposed to their laptop.

“We felt that it was important to make the site more compatible with mobile users. More and more people get their information from their phones or tablets, so adapting the website to be more in line with those pieces of technology was a priority. Those who go to the site on their home computers still have all the options as before and more, but now mobile users have that same access,” stressed Robertson. “The new site is also more user friendly. The old version of the site was great in its day, but it was slow loading, it was not user friendly and it was not easy for us to update. There were a lot of limitations to it, so we wanted something that we could manage in-house. We needed to clean the content up. It needed a whole new overhaul to be modern.”

Crewe added that the early response to the change has been exactly what they’d been hoping for.

“There has already been positive feedback on the site. People who were looking for updates on the garbage recently for example, and [noted] ‘oh, by the way. Great website’. So, there has been positive feedback already, plus Insightrix already has some data on the usage and the number of people checking it out on mobile devices has increased already. The breakout is almost 50-50 between home computers and mobile devices right now and those numbers were not nearly as comparable with the previous version. These little things can help put Neepawa a step ahead when it comes to sharing information with not only residents of Neepawa, but also visitors to our community.”