| The
City and County of Broomfield Web site has been serving residents of Broomfield,
and the Internet community, since 1998. The Web site is a service of the
City and County Manager’s Office. The site provides information
from departments and divisions at the city and county that will help expedite
finding what you need from your local government.
The Web site has more than 12,000
pages, images and other downloadable documents on it. The
information is updated directly from members of each department or
division to ensure that the most accurate information is always on
the Web site. When an emergency occurs, like the blizzard of 2006,
our home page has the urgent information that comes directly from
our Emergency Operations Center to keep residents up-to-date.
We are always adding more interactive
programs on the Web. Among the programs we have now are, paying your
Broomfield
utility bill or
property taxes online, searching the
library card
catalog and renewing library books, applying for a
posted job online,
searching Broomfield
property records
including seeing aerial views of the property and signing up
for
recreation classes. There is also an interactive
parks map that
shows location, amenities, photographs and information on how to reserve park
shelters.
Since 2006 we
have been expanding our video presence on the Web site including a 24/7
live stream of
our KCCB Cable Channel 8 broadcast. Along with that we began
archiving our council meetings and offering them
on demand on the Web. We now have nearly 100 council meeting and
concept review meeting videos on the Web site. In 2009 we released
more than 150
on demand videos of locally produced shows dating back to 2003.
We also offer embedded videos on site-specific pages, e.g., we have
a police canine video on our police
K-9 Unit
page.
Through the years we have been always
looking for more ways to reach our audience. In 2003 we began
offering
subscriber email for our viewers who wanted to receive council
meeting summaries. Since then we have added subscriber email for a
monthly recreation newsletter, auditorium event schedules and three
library newsletters geared for different patron age groups. In 2009
we are creating RSS feeds for our What's News in Broomfield news
briefs, recreation and auditorium events and library news.
As our audience changes how they get
their information, we have gone outside of the Web site to add
additional outlets for them. Today we have pages on the social
networks of
Facebook, Twitter
and MySpace,
(sometimes referred to as Web 2.0). We are already monitoring
developments in Web 3.0, which right now seems to be going in a
direction of a three-dimensional presence on the Web.
We continue to strive to make the Web
site faster and easier to navigate. After our most recent Web site
redesign and new navigation system, Broomfield's Web site was
awarded the top national Meritorious Award from the National
Association of County Information
Officers (NACIO) in 2007 for design, navigation and strong
content.
Our photographs on the Web site are
also award winners as a photojournalist’s piece by Joel Radtke
on the installation, dedication and visitation of the Broomfield 9-11 Memorial
took Best in Class national honors for photography in the NACIO awards.
|