City council agreed April 23 to purchase a mobile component for the city’s website www.thompson.ca

The city unveiled their brand new website layout on Feb 13 and since the launch, have seen an impressive jump in the site’s traffic.

The number of visits has not yet been tallied, and they will be brought forth at an upcoming finance and administration meeting, but Mayor Tim Johnston says the traffic has been very good to date.

In the always-evolving world of technology, more and more people are doing their online surfing via mobile devices, and stats show that Thompson.ca is getting a large influx of mobile traffic.

According to data gathered as of March 28, the city’s website has had 175 hits on the iPhone which accounted for 41.14 per cent of the mobile visits. iPad visits were the second most common with 166 visits or 33.03 per cent. Rounding out the sites mobile hits were BlackBerry, Android, and the iPod.

The website however, is not yet fitted with a mobile-specific version, making viewing the page difficult in some sections, and leaving some parts inaccessible.

Council agreed to contract VisionMobile, the mobile component of Vision Internet, who designed the website to begin with, to build the mobile version of the website.

An offer was put forth when Vision Internet was first contracted, to build the mobile component as well at a cost of $5,000.

“We wanted to concentrate on first getting the other site up and running,” said Johnston, “they (VisionMobile) have now come back and offered to do the mobile portion for $2,000, so patience did pay off this time.”

The mobile component does not require maintenance and will not come with any additional costs.

It is expected that the City of Thompson’s mobile website will be up and running within a month.