Residents will notice a completely redesigned county website this year.

Jim Venturini, the county's information technology director, received approval from the commissioners at a Wednesday meeting to contract with CivicPlus for website redesign services.

The first year of the contract will cost $145,000 and the second year will be $26,800. Venturini said CivicPlus has worked with local governments in website design for more than 20 years, and currently boasts more than 100 such clients in Pennsylvania alone.

While the address of the county website will remain www.co.butler.pa.us, it will sport a new look, Venturini said.

“It will be much more user friendly,” he said.

The new site will put the county in compliance with 2018 Americans with Disabilities Act regulations by providing a help desk for those with disabilities.

Venturini said the website would adapt for those with disabilities, such as blindness or deafness, so they could use it as well.

CivicPlus professionals will visit every department in the county, Venturini said, to discover what new information department heads want on the new website as well as what information should be transferred over from the current, six-year-old site.

He said the new site will be more compatible with smart phones than the existing site.

Overall, Venturini said, users should find the new site more modern and easy to use.

“I think you're going to see a lot more transparency in being able to access information more quickly,” he said.

The agreement with CivicPlus also includes agenda management services, which means the commissioners and other department heads can easily add and revise meeting agendas using an internal feature of the new website.

“If they want to put something in 20 minutes before a meeting, they can do that rather than go through the process we have now of scanning documents,” Venturini said. “It's a lot more efficient.”

He said the new site should appear before the end of the year.

Commissioner Kevin Boozel asked that the contract with CivicPlus include language that allows the county to pay as the work continues and not up front.

“I want to understand what we're getting, and by the end of the year what we're paying,” Boozel said.

Lori Altman, the county's director of human resources, said the commissioners were asked to vote now to take advantage of a discount from CivicPlus that expires on April 1.