GULF SHORES, Ala. — Gulf Shores is going to spend nearly $30,000 to revamp its website. The City Council OK’d the expenditure at its Sept. 10 meeting.

“I’m very excited to make a recommendation to the mayor and council to move forward with a company called Civic Plus,” Director of Recreation and Cultural Affairs Grant Brown said. “We’ve been talking about redoing the city’s website and the need to make it more usable, not only to our city business, but also to our public and our visitors to be able to find things with a much more logical method.”

According to Brown, Civic Plus has vast experience working with local governments to improve websites.

“They really specialize in municipal websites,” he said. “Not only did this company offer the website, but also the infrastructure and back of the house information that we can utilize as a city. It will be an excellent addition to what we’re trying to do here.”

The package approved also calls for training of city employees to run the website.

“Our recommendation is to move forward and to and contract with Civic Plus for an amount not to exceed $29, 553,” Brown said. “Of that amount, its $25,000-plus is to actually construct the website. Of the $25,000, $12,000 they’re putting back into it as training with people for the city.

“They come in on site and spend four days with up to 12 employees, department-head levels or their designees so that when we get this engine we’ll all know how to use it. We as departments can monitor and maintain our own information. We’re not relying on one single source person to add and to take things off.”

The additional $4,100 cost is an annual hosting fee, Brown said.

“It’s not just a hosting fee, it’s actually buying into their system,” he said. “Any revisions that are made come to the city of Gulf Shores. They have 24/7, 365-day-a-year support. It’s redundantly hosted in three locations around the country so nothing can crash within our city.”

Helping with some of the cost is a grant from the state Tourism Department that must be spent by the end of the month.

“The state tourism department authorized originally $10,000 and with proration the amount has now shrunk to $8,900 to be applied toward a new city website,” Brown said. “We do need to expend those dollars in the month of September. We need to have actually written a check to a company for them to send us our last payment. They’ve already sent us three of the four payments of that grant.”

Events Coordinator Blake Phelps helped with the research to find a new provider to build a new website and said it will increase service.

“What they do is they turn this website into more than just an information center,” he said. “It’s a resource for our residents, our visitors and our staff to do business. It makes it more efficient.”

An example that Brown and Phelps studied was the city of Destin’s website, a site that went live six months ago. Also helping in the project were city staffers Bridgette Reynolds, Shana Russell, among others, Brown said.

Phelps said the Destin site offered many advantages.

“One of the things the city of Destin, their public information officer said was from an epayment standpoint and also from just answering questions and frequently asked questions, their phone calls within a month had already dropped one third,” Phelps said. “They could then go their website. It was easy to find and it had information they needed. It was freeing up their time as a staff to be more efficient because everything was so easy to find.”

Brown said a lot of city business could be conducted through the new site, including businesses licenses and many permits.

It will take Civic Plus about six months to build the new site and it should be in place before the next summer season rolls around, Brown said.