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Date: 10/30/2023
BELCHERTOWN — The Select Board approved approximately $36,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to be used to build a new town website during its Oct. 23 meeting.
During the meeting, members from the Communications Committee, Information Technology Director Kevin Hannon and Ryan Anderson and Brian Wheeler from Civic Plus were all present to discuss building a new town website.
Hannon said, “CivicPlus is a government website provider that many communities around us use. After doing a bunch of research and looking into what our options are, we decided that we would like to move forward with CivicPlus.”
During their presentation, Anderson and Wheeler showed different town websites that they have helped design recently.
They went through different ways towns have displayed their news carousel, drop-down menus, how it would look on a mobile device and desktop, a predictive search option and how residents can subscribe to certain committee agendas or news notifications.
Each department would get their own updated page and each department head would oversee their respective page.
There will also be multiple training blocks to inform the department heads on every facet of the website so that they can update their pages and know how to make edits.
Communication Committee Chair Chris Martin has said that the current website is outdated, that it is difficult to find things and the overall usability is not great, so there is a lot that needs to be updated.
Between the training and building the website, Anderson said that whole process will take four to eight months with six months being the ideal launch date.
Hannon added he is hoping to launch the new website by June or July 2024.
He said, “One of key pieces to this also is we are going to start our annual contract and that is going to replace our existing annual contract.”
The Communications Committee had originally been working with Revize, with which the town has a contract, but decided to switch after how impressed they were with CivicPlus.
In the past, members of the Select Board have expressed that the townwide communication needs improvement and they see this new website helping them reach that goal.
Select Board Chair Ed Boscher said, “This has been one of our major goals and objectives for a couple of years now to improve the transparency and communication with the town. I am beyond impressed with what the presentation showed, and the approval of this website knocks that objective out of the ballpark.”
Town Administrator Steve Williams said, “I want to thank the efforts of our IT director, Kevin Hannon, and the Communications Committee and the representatives of CivicPlus who have been great to work with.”