Help Portsmouth fix its Web site (please!)

By John McDaid | Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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The Portsmouth Town Web site needs a facelift, and the Economic Development Committee (PEDC) has put together a survey to help build the case for change — so if you're familiar with the site and have thoughts to share, please take the survey.

This is not a reflection of work of the Town Administration, who have been trying to maintain a Web presence on a shoestring, and have no resources to devote to serious renovation. But look at it this way: There's nothing but upside opportunity here. So pitch in! What would you do to make this a shining example of Gov 2.0 citizen empowerment? Let the PEDC know what you think. And thanks!

Full disclosure: My personal perspective is that the site is a complete trainwreck. It's shovelware HTML which has been retrofitted and cruftified, with no content management system (CMS) and so no Web 2.0 features. I did some scoping work to evaluate bringing the site into a CMS two years ago, but it was too big a job to do as a solo volunteer.

Tags: 
Localblogging, 02871

Comments

Maddie_C

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 11:24am

John:

You talk about the town trying to maintain a website on a shoestring, and I'm just curious if you know how big that shoestring really is. Is there a line item in the town budget to maintain the website? Do we know what we spend on it?

John McDaid

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 11:53am

Hi, Maddie...
I haven't seen this broken out in the Town Budget -- I think it's lumped under Town Hall IT, which is yearly about $60K.

Best Regards.
--John

Portsmouth Sailor

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 11:48am

Rather than doing it ourselves, is there an opportunity to find already hosted models of e-government? The industry buzz is all about moving things into the cloud, centralizing development and creating applications that are relevant to many individual parties. Are there government applications (something along the lines of salesforce.com) that might in the long run 1) provide a better service and 2) reduce future development costs? These types of services still allow you to customize content towards you constituency, but the functionality could more or less be the same across every town in RI. We don't have to reinvent the wheel here, particularly if cost is an issue. Which it always is!.

John McDaid

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 12:02pm

Hi, Portsmouth Sailor...
Absolutely -- a market scan would need to be part of the first phase of any project to update the Town site, and one of the first rules should be "Zero development." These tools are sufficiently mature that just about everything should be available plug-and-play. The beauty of open-source is that you can snap things in: you might host the site with one provider and have some core functions in your CMS, and leverage other online services where they make sense (documents, forms, calendaring, etc.)

One thing worth noting, though, is that software as a service (SaaS) and cloud models do present new challenges from a data security and storage longevity perspective. There are arguments to be made for the Town "owning" its data and controlling where it's stored. But these are risks that would be evaluated in any study.

Best Regards.
--John

PEDC-Chair

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 2:56pm

This is a very important endeavor. There are many potential "fixes" out there and we are trying to get our arms around the problem.

In fact, the State of RI has a web development assistance program and has template forms and a consultant to help with developing web sites for state organizations and municipalities.

But the fix is only the first step - populating the site with good data AND continuing maintenance and the ability for many people to update content is essential.

Thanks for all the comments.

Please take the survey.

Rich Talipsky, PEDC Chair