Selectmen try to hammer out plan for website
Date: 8/13/2012
By Chris Maza
chrism@thereminder.comLONGMEADOW — The Select Board continued discussions regarding the town's website at its Aug. 7 meeting, calling upon Information Technology Director Kevin Warenda to come before the board with his suggestions.
Warenda said that while he recognized the positive potential of outsourced services, such as CivicsPlus, he did not feel that the current Wordpress platform was necessarily the website's primary problem, but rather the system through which the town gathers content for the site.
"This isn't a technology issue. It's an issue of content management," he said. "In reality, to justify the kind of expense required [to utilize CivicsPlus], we really need to build capacity internally ... I think there are a number of things that need to be built first before we start spending $8,000 a year on a commercial content management system that really all the features are geared toward a site that already has the content, it's just going to distribute it better. If you don't have a robust platform of information to distribute, then the site's features are kind of wasted.
"[Wordpress] is probably perfectly sufficient for our operations, but we need to do the work of actually posting content, looking at data, making changes to the organizational structure," he continued.
Warenda continued by saying that past discussions regarding the website have not yielded any real, concrete solutions on how to fix the problem.
"Quite bluntly, all I feel like we've been doing is saying, 'It doesn't work, it doesn't work, it doesn't work,' [instead of] saying, 'What doesn't work about it? What are we going to do to address that?'" he said.
Warenda suggested a system of organization through which a singular web manager works with department heads, as well as working with other community organizations to create content and manages it accordingly. Currently, department heads are responsible for adding content to the website.
"The past web managers engaged the community," he said. "There needs to be someone coordinating the effort. It's sad that you can go on [former volunteer Webmaster James Moran's]
LongmeadowBiz[.com] site and find information that isn't on the town website."
Warenda said that "distributed management doesn't work" and pointed to the Longmeadow Public Schools, which runs its own website network, as a system that works well.
"The School Department websites are a good example of what could be done. They're attractive, up to date and there is one person who is involved with updating the content," he said. "Each school has a stipend for a website manager. Usually it is not the principal and likewise, department heads are probably not the right people to do it."
Select Board Chair Paul Santaniello concurred with Warenda's assessment, stating that since relieving Moran of his duties the board has entrusted department heads with extra responsibilities with little training.
"We shut off a faucet of information for the town and handed it to the department heads and told them to do it," he said.
Selectman Mark Gold added that from the discussion, it was his understanding that the Select Board did not place enough importance on website maintenance.
"The perception is we did not make maintenance a high enough priority," he said. "We didn't create a sense of urgency to keep it up."
Gold added that he felt the website needed more continuity between different departments' pages.
"If you're looking for meeting minutes from one department, you might have to do it one way and for another department, you have to look somewhere completely different," he said.
Gold also stated that the town should look into the use of social media, especially in emergency situations.
"Last October, we needed Facebook and Twitter for the town so that people could know what was going on," he said.
