VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – A city councillor is defending the decision to spend $3 million on a re-vamp of its website. Heather Deal claims it wasn’t just a makeover, but a full tear-down and rebuild.

Spending millions on new websites may be more than what Surrey and Richmond spent, combined. But Deal says the cost is comparable to the $3.2 million Calgary recently spent to re-do its website.

“It was actually started under Sam Sullivan’s reign with the NPA,” explains Deal. “It has been supported unanimously by council since then.”

It has been a labour-intensive process.

“For five years, we’ve had up to 20 people at a time working to dissect every single one of the existing 60,000 web pages that the city had: what data is in them, who uses what, doing focus groups, and analyzing other city websites to find out how we can best manage the data,” outlines Deal.

“We had to completely take down every single piece of data that was there, re-package it, put it back together in different ways, make it more accessible, [and] change the search engine. This is a massive project.”

Deal was shocked to hear concerns from fellow Councillor George Affleck about too much of the mayor on the site. “That is just laughable.”

“Gregor Robertson is the mayor of the city. It’s one small picture of him down on the website saying ‘if you want to contact me, here’s how you do it.’ Unless Councillor Affleck considers photographs of people walking on the seawall, Stanley Park and the downtown core with sidewalks and bike lanes something about Gregor, as opposed to the city, then I don’t understand those comments at all.”

She hopes people check the site out and see how user-friendly it is.

“Not only did we have to drag the website out of very early website design and structure, and turn it into one that is not only vibrant and active right now but one that can grow and morph in the years to come.”