The town’s outdated and difficult to navigate website will soon receive an extensive overhaul, with internal work with a new website provider beginning this month and an anticipated go-live date for the new site in late July.

“The Town of Westbrook’s website was falling short of its goals by being cumbersome to navigate, having untimely and incomplete information and being difficult to upload information in a timely manner. Along with the fact that the website pages were routinely hacked and proliferated with damaging information, the Town of Westbrook’s website was identified as a critical path element to enabling town employees and the town itself to get things effectively communicated and distributed to the residents,” the Information Technology Committee wrote in its activity summary for the Board of Selectmen (BOS).

The committee’s first task was to identify the shortcomings of the town’s current website and find a new municipal website vendor whose product would address those concerns. The committee first identified the business requirements for the town’s new website, then developed a request for proposal (RFP), a 50-page document, for a product that would address those needs. Nine firms responded to the RFP and four were invited in to demonstrate their municipal website product’s functionality.

Finance Director Donna Castracane said that a lot of town staff participated in the evaluation of the final four vendors’ website products.

“They were most enthusiastic about CivicPlus,” said Castracane.

Castracane said that CivicPlus municipal websites have been used in the City of Norwalk for five years and was locally adopted by the Town of Clinton.

With the new website will come new expanded capabilities to help residents connect with town government. Residents will be able to sign up to receive automatic emergency alert notifications, and copies of specific town board and commission meeting agendas and notices. Also loaded on the new website will be the town’s Code of Ordinances and various town forms like dog license applications.

“The website will bring added functionality,” said Information Technology Committee Chairman Ken Butterworth.

Castracane agreed, saying that the new website will be an easier site to use for both staff and residents. Town staff will able to load information like agendas and minutes on the website themselves rather than relying on a single gatekeeper to do that work.

First Selectman Noel Bishop gave Butterworth and his committee an A+ for last week’s report to the BOS summarizing the results of the group’s six month study.

“It was an excellent presentation,” said Bishop.

Bishop said he and the other selectmen were also impressed by the thoroughness and professionalism with which the committee tackled their charge of assessing the town’s website and information technology infrastructure to suggest improvements.

Both the BOS and the Board of Finance were on hand to hear the IT presentation. After Butterworth finished, the BOS voted to accept the recommendation to contract with Civic Plus for new town website, approving $12,450 now to pay Civic Plus for development work through June 30, the end of the fiscal year. Another payment of $12,450 would be due to the firm in July 2018 (the next fiscal year) once the new website goes live.

“I applaud Noel for his selection of who is on the IT Committee. We worked hard, meeting every Thursday night for six months,” said Butterworth.

Next Steps

Butterworth explained that the vendor identified four work phases that lie ahead.

After the town and vendor sign a contract, work will begin with a kick-off meeting in February followed by an in-depth town needs assessment and data and form collection phase. By the end of February or early March, the group should be able to examine a gray-scale lay-out of the new website. Once that concept is approved, the firm would develop a color-concept website.

“By the middle of May, we should be able to complete approval of the website design,” said Butterworth. “Starting in June, [CivicPlus] will begin populating the new website with real data and documents. In early July, we expect town staff training to begin.

“Our goal is to launch the new website for external users by late July,” said Butterworth.

With progress on the town website made, the committee will now focus on its second task, broadly assessing the status of town’s information technology and the services provided to support it. The goal of this work is to develop a town IT plan for the purchase and maintenance of the IT hardware, software, and network services. The committee will likely develop a second RFP for firms able to provide this support.

Castracane said that in the new town budget under development, a new department called Information Technology is included. This account will consolidate the information technology line items that are now part of individual department’s budgets.

Currently, the town engages Enterprise Computer to provide and maintain the town’s computer hardware; as a town benefit, the firm has provided at no cost to the town services to develop and maintain the current town website.