City redesigns website for functionality, style

    FORT LUPTON — The city’s website is putting on a fresh face and drawing on some up-and-coming local talent for the makeover.
    Approved for a long-awaited upgrade by city council, the website will soon take on some added functionality along with appearance updates more befitting the city’s pro-growth stance.
    “We knew for a while that the website needed at the very least a facelift,” city human resources director Jeanelle Andersen said. “It has been a long time coming.”
    Not so long in coming was the city’s desire to have some local help on the project.
    “We have a college student who is helping us design it, and I was tasked with putting that together,” Anderson said of her role in the design process and plans to refurbish the online content with input from each department. “What we are going to do is get together a committee internally of different employees so that it’s not just one individual. Those individuals that are going to be working the closest with it and those that are in charge of updating their sections, I want to make sure they are on that committee. ”
    Currently in the design and pre-approval stage, the website is the product of Fort Lupton resident, Aims student and now-teacher Jake Umberger, who instructs a class in Multimedia Graphics Design/Web Design on the Greeley campus. His company, FameUse Design, has the contract for the Fort Lupton site, worth approximately $25,000, according to Andersen.
    In addition to the appearance and functionality boost, the site will feature a new economic development page, ostensibly to go along with the city’s new economic development specialist, scheduled for hire mid to late February.
    Also in the works is a plan to make the site more homogenous from page to page and do away with some of the dissimilarities evident in the current version.
    “If you go from the city to the parks and rec page, it looks like you are going to a completely different city,” Andersen said. “We want it to look uniform.
    “One of the things we don’t do, and one of the things we will do, is we will have an economic development page,” Andersen added. “That will be the first department to see change, and will include the planning and the zoning that we have out there now.”
    The resulting pages will be more database-oriented behind the scenes, to make searches and locating specific data more effective.
    “A little more color, a little more ‘pop,” Andersen said. “A little more interactive, a little more flair. We are hoping it will be more interactive with the community.”
    For more information about FameUse Design, visit http://www.fameusedesign.com/aboutus.html