New Directions Planned for Village
Website
by Judy Silberstein
(
January
8, 2003)
The Village Technology Committee has begun to make
plans for modifying the official Village
website,
reported Trustee Mike Wiener at the January 6, 2003
Board meeting. “We have a website; it needs to
be updated and brought up to speed to handle new functions
such as e-commerce and putting more information up
more easily,” he explained.
To implement their plans, committee members are looking
to outside professionals to redesign the site and to
develop the mechanisms necessary for handling secure
commercial transactions, such as using credit cards
to pay for parking permits online. Committee Chairperson
Peter Rush and Trustee Wiener, who serves as liaison
to the group, are working on the draft for an “RFP” (request
for proposal) to solicit bids for the various support
functions. They hope to have the draft ready to share
with the rest of their committee and the Village Board
by the end of the month.
In the past, volunteer members of the committee developed
and maintained the website. (NOTE: The Publishers of
Larchmont Gazette were both founding members of the
original technology committee and served until after
the elections of 2002.)
Said Wiener, “If we’re going to take the
web up to the next level, the issues become much more
complex, and the support will need to be more immediate
than we feel is proper to burden individual residents
within the village.”
The current concept is to have professionals redesign
the site so that Village staff can handle most of the
updating work. Said Rush, “While you may use
the outside firm to post new sections, the idea is
to make the site much more 'user friendly' from
the staff point of view.” Currently, the Village
Clerk adds events to the online calendar, but there
have been only a few other items added by the new committee
which began meeting in October.
Wiener and Rush have been looking at other municipal
websites, such as the one for the City
of Rye which
allows residents to use the Official Payments Corporation website for paying property taxes by credit card. For
example, by paying an extra 3%, ($300 on a $10,000
tax) City of Rye residents can pay their Rye Neck School
real estate tax.
More details on the website and the committee's plans
will be announced at the next Village Board meeting
on January 27, 2003.
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