Marana officials have been working for several months to revamp the five-year-old version of the municipal website and are looking at a June launch after a series of delays.
Town officials began planning for the new site last fall and hoped to have it in place in time for the WGC Accenture Match Play golf championships, held last month.
A week before the tournament, Town Manager Gilbert Davidson said the new launch date was late April or early May.
"We are literally building, from the ground up, a multidimensional website," he said. "It's taken a lot more time than what we originally anticipated."
New features will include secure water bill payments and an interactive community calendar, he said.
Town spokesman Rodney Campbell said last week that traffic for the town site - www.marana.com - doubles in the weeks before and during Match Play, making it risky to launch a revamped site if it hadn't been sufficiently tested.
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"The last thing you want to do is roll out this great new website and have so much traffic you run into unanticipated problems and have to pull the whole thing down," he said.
Preliminary design work was done by local outfit WestWordVision, which already had worked with the town on its heritage project, said company owner Paula Schaper.
That work culminated in a 32-page color brochure about Marana's roots. The packet was distributed in June at a ceremony honoring town matriarch Ora Mae Harn.
Through that work, Schaper said, "we felt like we had come to know who they (Maranans) were on a deeper level."
The company was asked to design the new look for the website. That work cost $10,390, Campbell said.
When Schaper looks at the current site design, she said she sees limits.
"The current one does not reflect the vastness and openness and what I think is the progressive nature of Marana," she said.
A website should represent, as much as possible, who your company or community is, she said.
The theme for the new design created by WestWordVision is "lenses and layers." The images are meant to show roundedness and depth while being futuristic, sharp and clean.
Rather than outsourcing the programming work, town technical services staffers are building the entire site between their other duties.
Lately, the group also has been performing server room upgrades and software upgrades for the finance department, adding to the website delays, said Barbara Johnson, who as general manager of public services oversees the technical services department.
She guessed the old site - a template package through Civic Plus - had about 200 ready-made pages, where the new one will have about 350 pages, all of which are being coded in-house.
"It just turned out to be an ambitious schedule," Johnson said of previous estimates for the site's completion. After testing last-minute additions the town requested, the site will likely go live in early May but won't launch for the public until a month later, allowing time to work out bugs.
Also adding to the delay was the huge amount of outdated information that had to be culled from the old site so it wouldn't transfer to the new one, she said.
To keep such a pileup from happening again under the new system, each department will be responsible for maintaining its own information, and if site administrators see no activity from a certain department in a long time, the department will get a reminder, Johnson said.
A surprise outcome of the upgrade, she said, was that town departments have collaborated in ways they never did previously, and a lot more of them now understand what the others do.
"A lot of internal time has been spent, and as a result of that there's a lot of people that know each other's business a lot better," she said.
"We're better able to find solutions to problems that way."
Contact reporter Shelley Shelton at sshelton@azstarnet.com or 807-8464.
