Town Websites that get it....

Now I am not THE expert, but I do have some expertise in the area of web site development.

I can say that the first step is to have one- be it a full blown interactive one like say this blog corporate site, or for that matter my simple blog. You simply have to be out here and interactive with the community.

The second step and this is crucial is keeping the information current. If you don't keep that site up to date and current then you might as well simply pull that information down off the web. It gets to the point where it actually hurts your image. An example of this is the School Committee's Meeting Minutes- they should just be pulled down or get them to be all current. I will also say that if you go out to look up the districts information it is amazingly inconsistent. It just looks bad. I give credit to the principals for keeping their end of the information up, but the consistency that is supposed to mandated isn't there... something that was again also pointed out by the MA DOE.

I will also say, that if we as a town don't get a web site that is up and working, we as a community look like we are still the stone ages. As I said above even if it is something that is simply a higher end blog that is developed on Typepad (which doesn't cost all that much monthly) or work on getting set up a fully functional virtual town hall where town's people can actually pay online their town bills... The following are towns that are in the Worcester County that have sites that are actually getting it right:

http://www.shrewsbury-ma.gov/ The Town of Shrewsbury
http://www.ci.southbridge.ma.us The Town of Southbridge , and check out the library section
http://www.town.oxford.ma.us/Pages/index The Town of Oxford
http://www.clintonmass.com/index.shtml The Town of Clinton


Two of the towns above use the following company. It is something that may be worth looking into and or investing into if we are not going to bringing the technology or expertise or the time in house.

The Virtual Town Hall is a company that does this for Municipalities so the Municipalities do not have to buy Web development software, a Web server, and connect the server to the Internet, back it up at night, and protect it from hackers. VTH takes care of all that. They are the application server provider.