The City of London’s website is poised for a refresh.

On Tuesday, city council approved a digital makeover for london.ca, a website first launched in 2013.

The redesign will be carried out by local web design and digital agency Digital Echidna, which was awarded a contract for nearly $500,000 following Tuesday’s meeting.

“This is not a tweaking of our current website, it’s an entire refresh,” said deputy city manager Lynne Livingstone.

Livingstone added that Londoners consider accessibility one of the “biggest pain points” in using the city’s website, a sentiment that was echoed by Ward 5 Coun. Maureen Cassidy.

“I’m not completely foreign to technology, but sometimes it’s very frustrating for me to access information that I know is there on the city’s website,” Cassidy said.

Ward 10 Coun. Paul Van Meerbergen raised concerns about the nearly $500,000 contract for the redesign.

“[London’s] IT department is very well endowed and very well resourced… it strikes me that this kind of work should be able to be handled in house, and if the expertise isn’t there, then it should be arranged,” Van Meerbergen said.

City manager Martin Hayward replied to the councillor’s concerns, noting that the city’s IT resources are tapped.

“The IT area has undergone a number of changes, and if I went through with you all the statistics, I think you’d find out that it is not as well resourced as the councillor replied. Also, the budget is largely made up of software licences and that type of thing,” Hayward said.

The city manager added that the move toward redesigning the City of London website is about “taking it the next level” and moving it into cloud software, which would reduce the need for hardware support.

“That does take some money, but it does reduce the overall impact in terms of what we need to provide internally,” Hayward said.

The motion to approve the contract for the redesign passed 14-1, with Van Meerbergen standing as the lone vote opposed.

The redesigned website is set to launch by October 2020.

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