The website features new applications that enhance navigation and functionality without sacrificing any of the valuable information users of the site have grown accustomed to having at their fingertips.
"We strove to create a more focused site that would be user-friendly and would allow hunters and anglers to find the information they were looking for quickly," said Donna Covington, information technology systems consultant with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. "We developed it using a responsive Web design so that no matter what platform they were viewing it on, whether it be a desktop computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone, it would be easy to read and navigate."
For the first time, visitors to the department's website have the ability to access their Kentucky Fish and Wildlife transactions, including license and permit history and telecheck information, through the "Find My Information" page. The database goes back to 1996.
Looking to get in touch with a conservation officer, conservation education program leader, fisheries biologist or wildlife biologist in a specific county? That information is just a few clicks away using the "Find My County Contact" feature. Search results are sorted by type and include the name, phone number and email address for each county contact.
Kentucky Fish and Wildlife staff partnered with contractor Kentucky Interactive to develop the new site, which is best viewed using the latest versions of web browsers like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari. The department's website has logged approximately 18 million web hits this year, Covington said.
As major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo index pages from the new website in the coming weeks, the search function will become fully functional. Bookmarks to pages on the previous website no longer will work.
Improvements to the new website will be ongoing, Covington said. Plans include the development of a more substantial online presence for public hunting areas by merging wildlife management information with public hunting information, giving visitors the ability to view that information in one place.
