(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Department of Public Safety has updated the look and some of the features of the Sex Offender Registry website. D-C-I Agent Hunter Bellon oversees the site and says one thing they updated is the landing page. “Put a few of those features that we found were most used more prominently on that landing page to include our search feature in a lot of different locations. We’ve updated our most wanted landing site and our active registrant website,” Bellon says.

He says they’ve added what’s called a “heat map” to the iowasexoffender.gov site that shows where the 67-hundred registered offenders are located. “We had that in a portion of our old site, but it was searchable by county. So now you can go in and on this interactive map, scroll over any of the areas that you’re looking at and it gives you a count of offenders that are in those particular areas, then you can click on that particular county or area and it actually pulls up those offenders that are in that area,” he says.

Bellon says they send out some 70-thousand notifications each month to those who sign up to get them.  “We received millions of pings on our site, so that’s somebody going in and clicking on the various features so, it’s a widely used site,” Bellon says. “We’re super happy that people are using it and we want people to know about it so they continue to use that to provide safety for them and their family.” Bellon says you can still get the same notifications with the new website.

“If anyone is going into the site that has an established account already on the old site, all of their watches and notifications will continue to transmit. However, if they sign in on the new site, they will have to establish a new account with an e-mail address. And once they sign in under that new account, they’ll have the option to merge their old account in their new account. So everything should carry over seamlessly,” Bellon says.

Bellon says if you have trouble signing in, you can get help on the contact page of the website.