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Youngsters Help Make Kaipara's Website 'Child's Play'

Tuesday 24 June 2008, 1:21PM

By Kaipara District Council

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Dargaville Primary School students
Dargaville Primary School students Credit: Kaipara District Council

DARGAVILLE

Kaipara District Council wants accessing and using its website www.kaipara.govt.nz to be child’s play, so who better to give it the thumbs up than six Dargaville Primary School students.

The site was set up in 2002 and is proving very popular, recording between 215,000 and 370,000 hits from an average of about 11,000 individual visitors each month.

But to check how user-friendly it is the children, aged between eight and 10, were asked to find specific information on Kaipara’s site and compare it to a number of other council websites.

They found www.kaipara.govt.nz easy to navigate and ranked it ahead of several others. They have also suggested a number of improvements, like the addition of quick search opportunities and drop down menus, which will be incorporated as a result.

Jessica McLean, Georgia Romley, Chloe Read, Sarah de Bruin, Conor Willy and Melissa Bickers had all used the internet but did not consider themselves experienced.

Finding the Council’s contact details took them about a second; finding the names of Councillors a couple of seconds and job vacancies came up in about three seconds. Locating zone rules proved the most difficult but most found their way there in under two minutes.

The students especially liked the drop down menus and quick search capabilities of some sites and felt Kaipara’s needed more of these.

Stakeholder Engagement Manager Claire Lichtwark-McInnes says Kaipara District Council is always looking to improve its website service and involving the children provided some valuable information. However, suggestions of possible improvements from other users are also very welcome.

“When we set it up in 2002 we were aiming for 80,000 hits a month and we exceeded this very early on. It is a very heavily used site and we get some very positive feed back.

But we’re always looking for ways to improve it although in doing so we want to keep the things that make it so well used in the first place.”

Council is moving more of the website’s management and development in-house and staff are being trained to take over this role. This will increase flexibility and also reduce costs.

www.kaipara.govt.nz provides a wealth of information and news about the Kaipara District and the Council’s operations, plus downloadable forms.