New website meant to strengthen Round Lake Park community connection

Round Lake Park is a small community but its police department has big ideas on how to reach and interact with the public.

This past Wednesday, the department launched its own website, http://www.rlppd.us/, as another tool to dispense information and boost its commitment to social media as a way to reach residents.

"The website is the focal point of our communications," said Chief George Filenko.

"I wanted to make this as user-friendly as possible but keep it professional," he added. "Let's face it, people live on the internet."

Police information has been and still is available via a departments listing on the revamped village website. But since last fall, Filenko and volunteers with expertise in web design have developed, honed and launched the new site as its own entity. Graphics are unique to the site and have a different format and look.

Filenko said there were "too many go-betweens" with the village website to introduce new information quickly.

"It's more emergency based and (designed) to interact with all the social media sites we've been experimenting with," he added.

The site spans a cornucopia of topics and includes news releases on police activity in town, crime tips, how to pay violations, Freedom of Information and vacation watch forms, articles such as how to deal with dementia, information on various programs and links to a variety of information.

"We want people to understand we have other resources they can sign up for," Filenko said.

He contends the site can serve a dual role as the village works to rebrand itself. In one message with accompanying photo, he encourages residents to join him for a cup of coffee at the recently opened Main Street Cafe.

"The main thing was accessibility and marketability not only for the police department but the village, too," Filenko said of the new website. He's been attending seminars geared to government and law enforcement and the use of social media, which he considers a key to public interaction.

"You want it to be professional, you want it to be informative and pop up on the search engine. When you search Round Lake Park police department the first thing you'll see is this website," he said.

The endeavor is still in progress with more features, such as YouTube videos and an information page in Spanish, planned.