New City of Victoria Website

I have been waiting for an update to the City of Victoria website for a long time.   The old site was set up in such a way to make more or less impossible to find information.   Much of this was due to the horrible search engine they used - it was very hard to get relevant results.   My hope is that this will improve.

The new website is graphically nicer, but the information still seems to be organized in the same way as before. I wonder if the search is any better?  

• My first try is going to be to find my local area plan.  The search seems to have found and the navigation seems to have worked well.
• My second try is to find the council meeting schedule.   The search worked well, but the navigation was not obvious.
• My third try is to find the sign by-law.  The search got me close, close enough to find the right page, the navigation was much better than before.
• My fourth try is to find something from the minutes of a past meeting.  Here the search function did not work.   The site navigation could get me to where the minutes are kept, but I would have to read through all of them individually to find what I was looking for.

It seems the search function works much better than beofre.   The site navigation also seems to be better than before.

I have not yet tried to find something more specific or detailed for my work, but for the moment it seems that this site works much better than before and I should be able to find what I am looking for.

What would I like to see that is not there yet?

I would like to see more past documents, ideally past elections, what bylaws have been passed and when they were taken off of the books, old plans for the city and other such stuff.   Easier access to the past will allow us all to better understand how we got to where we are now and that should lead to better local governance.

I would also like to see past minutes searchable and indexed.   It has to be relevant to the day to day functioning of the City to find records of what was done at council meetings in the past.   I assume that there is some form of internal search or index function in the minutes.   If, as I assume, it exists, making the minutes usefully searchable should an easy task.