Why Don't the Borough Website Alerts Work?

Welcome to "You Ask … Patch Answers," the weekly column for Chathamites looking for solutions to community problems or issues.

One reader asked:

"I have been trying for weeks to sign up for alerts from the Chatham Borough website, but I never receive anything. Do you know what's going on?"

Nicholas Eck, from the Communication Technology Committee, told the Borough Council last week that the online subscriptions option through the borough websites "leaves a little to be desired."

The subscription option had reached the maximum number of subscribers and would not allow any more people to sign up for alerts. In asddition, the alerts system constantly runs into problems with spam filters that sometimes prevent the e-mails from being sent to the subscribers.

Eck outlined these and other limitations of the borough's website, which was built in 2004. The site's content, Eck said, is "not very well organized," that the search function was extremely limited, agendas and meetings were often listed a counterintuitive way and that the capacity of the site is so limited that it can sometimes take Borough Clerk Susan Caljean 45 minutes to upload documents.

"Over the last year we've done a lot of ... banging our heads against the wall, trying to figure out who is the best provider, what is the best solution," Eck said. "We want to organize the site. We want to work on facailitating open government and administrative ease of use is not where we'd like it to be."

Among the improvements that the committee hopes to bring to the website is increased user friendliness, an "interactive online calendar" that would link to agendas and minutes rather than simply a PDF of the printed borough calendar, better search functions and even the ability to stream the meetings over the Internet.

"We're looking for a way for our borough [employees] to get in there and do their job more effectively," Eck said. The new website would also include an updated and improved search function. "There's a lot of content out on the site, but it's not easy to get around and find what you need to."

Eck and the committee recommended two companies for the project, both of which have experience designing municipal government websites. The first, Zumu, is a New Jersey company operating out of Atlantic Highlands. The company offers no start-up fees for the development of the website's project, an annual fee of $1,700 and a five-year plan of $8,500.

Zumu, Eck said, is privately held and primarily does school websites but has experience with government and municipal sites as well. Some of the websites that Zumu has designed are the sites for Atlantic Highlands, Bay Head and Little Silver.

The second option the committee presented was E-Gov Link, a larger company that works extensively on municipal and government websites. E-Gov Link offered two options to the borough: one with a total first-year cost of $7,700 and an annual cost after that of $4,200, plus other startup expenses for a five-year total of $24,500, the second with a total first-year cost of $10,900 and an annual cost after that of $2,400 for a five-year total of $20,500.

E-Gov Link has designed sites for West Richland, Wash., Skokie, Ill. and New Providence, N.J.

Councilmember Joe Marts said that the expense of designing a new website may be a difficult one to fund. "One of the obvious [crises] that we face is the 2 percent cap, so the dollar issues will be very, very difficult," Marts said.

Eck responded that if the borough had a website with enough functionality to it, it could possibly create money-saving opportunities. Advertising, though, was not presented as an option for the sites by any of the design companies that the committee spoke to as they explored options for the website.

Eck also said that the committee was "pretty evenly split" on which option to go with. Those who liked E-Gov Links, he said, "thought that their experience and their website was considerably better, and worth it." Others, he said, "thought that we weren't getting enough for that extra money" and that with Zumu, "we were getting a lot" for a limited amount of money.

Councilmember Jim Lonergan said that when designing a website, "you pay for what you get."

Harris outlined his preference for E-Gov Links by saying that their sites "have a lot of documents there and they have a good navigation system for retrieving those documents. That's something we haven't really seen with the Zumu sites, but we're not sure if that's because [of] limitations on behalf of the Zumu product or on the part of the municipality.

"We have five, six years of minutes on the website. That's a lot of documents. The E-Gov people have a good way of organizing them," Harris said.

Redesigning the website, Eck said, will likely take two months after the council decides on an option. Harris and Borough Mayor Nelson Vaughan said they hope members of the public will explore the options from both companies and make their opinions known to the council.