On Feb. 9, the face of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough’s website will look dramatically different, more like a magazine cover than a government landing page. The guts of the site will transform too in a helpful way. The changed look is the idea of Borough Manager John Moosey who wants the website to showcase Alaska's great qualities to draw new companies here.
With giant ceremonial scissors before a massive computer screen, Borough Manager John Moosey will cut a gold ribbon, unveiling the new web site at 11 am today before employees.
The Borough’s website is vital to the daily work of many. We average 6,976 views on the My Property page a day, that’s more than 2.5 million a year. It’s massively useful to realtors, appraisers, bankers, reporters, and utilities as well as regular citizens. We have been told by delivery companies that they use our system instead of Google Maps because of its local accuracy. One of the things that we’re trying to do with the new site is to bring some of the utility and ease of use that you see in MyProperty to the rest of the site.
You will be able to find items more easily. Instead of documents tucked behind departments, they will be located under simple categories: Government, Services, Economy, Communities, and Lifestyle. We know the start is bumpy and we are working on connecting the 20,000 pages from the old site.
For the first time the Borough website will be responsive to the smaller screens of mobile and tablet users.
The web storytelling effort is aimed not at drawing new residents to live here but at convincing the principals of engineering firms, the GMs of professional and industrial businesses and more that the Mat-Su is an ideal home for satisfied employees and their company offices or headquarters.
Most here know that Mat-Su is an outlier for population growth in Alaska. In a single decade our population grew by 50 percent. Latest figures have us at 98,063 residents. Our student body grows by nearly a school a year. Employment growth is up four percent. More than a third of Alaska’s housing was built here in 2010 and 40 percent in 2011. People come for the larger house, the bigger plot of land that the dollar can buy. But lifestyle is rooted squarely in where people choose to live. Our trails, fish, recreation, mountains, auroras, and the way we live cannot be separated from economic development. Our web will highlight this great lifestyle.
Our first profiles center on what most Alaskans are made of: grit. The grittiest mountain runners in Alaska are from here: Christy Marvin and Eric Strabel who complete likely America’s hardest mountain race right here in the Mat-Su Borough. Our profiles focus on the creation of a local movie by two brothers and a Palmer film crew that grew into a movie built by a community: Moose the Movie. The industrial activity at Port MacKenzie is highlighted in aerial shots over the top of a ship as it offloads 16 miles of concrete-coated pipe for the Furie natural gas project near Nikiski. Our attention turns to the underdogs, the Mat-Su Borough Fish & Wildlife Commission, who took on the veteran team before the Alaska Board of Fisheries and brought about transformation on two of our rivers last summer.
One immediate opportunity is for the website redesign to draw the attention of some 50 site selectors coming to town this fall. These visitors are representatives traveling to Alaska specifically for the purpose of considering whether to relocate business here. We hope we convince them to stay.
The new website was created by IT and Public Affairs. For more information call Public Affairs Director Patty Sullivan at 861-8577 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Government
Services
Projects & Development
Property & Maps
Lifestyle
About