GREENFIELD — The city launched a new website this week, designed with an eye toward improved usability and accessibility.

“We’re really excited about it,” said Caitlin von Schmidt, administrative assistant to the mayor. “I really do hope people find it easy to use.”

The website, which can still be found at greenfield-ma.gov, went live on Wednesday.

Through a competitive bidding process, Michigan-based Revize was selected for the website redesign. The city last redesigned its website in 2015.

Von Schmidt said the city has been working on the project “in earnest” for the last few months, completing a full overhaul of the former site.

“We’ve checked all the information, updated, organized it,” she explained. “It was a pretty big task.”

In designing the new website, von Schmidt said usability was the main goal. The site has a widget that can adjust the size and color of the text, as well as a tool that modifies the site to have a dyslexia-friendly font.

“In a perfect world, nobody would need us to ask a question — not because we don’t want to answer questions,” von Schmidt said. “Sometimes you have a question and it’s 10 o’clock at night.”

Mayor Roxann Wedegartner and her Chief of Staff Dani Letourneau announced the launch of the new website at a City Council meeting earlier this month. Letourneau explained that as part of the total overhaul of the website, the duties and descriptions of each committee and commission have been included.

“We’ve really simplified and made it … so people will understand what these commissions do,” she said, crediting von Schmidt for her involvement in the effort.

Von Schmidt noted that for the next week or two, it may take search engines, such as Google, time to update the search result for the city website. Additionally, if people have links saved for pages on the old city website, those links may have changed.

Precinct 1 Councilor Katherine Golub thanked administrators for the work that went into the website.

“I know how much goes into that,” she said, “and it’s a very important accessibility issue.”

Reporter Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne.

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