Luzerne County’s administration has selected a company to redesign the county website — a project promised to make government information more accessible to the public.
“The current county website was posted in 2005, and it doesn’t fully or accurately depict what Luzerne County is or what it can do,” said county Manager C. David Pedri.
CivicPlus, based in Manhattan, Kansas, will be paid $41,250 annually for four years, or a total $165,000, for the redesign, hosting and maintenance, according to the contract posted on the manager’s page at www.luzernecounty.org.
The county’s capital budget earmarked $150,000 in past-borrowed funds for the upgrade.
The remaining $15,000 will come from the county’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, an agency that promotes tourism, primarily funded by 1 percent of the county’s 5 percent hotel tax. The bureau received $548,326 from the hotel tax in 2016, county records show.
When the total contractual amount is paid to CivicPlus in July 2021, the county will own the website and archived information, the contract says.
Several companies submitted proposals to redo the website, and a team of staffers selected CivicPlus, Pedri said.
The company has focused exclusively on local government websites for 20 years and has more than 2,500 clients throughout the country, its site says, touting its success connecting municipal employees and elected officials with the citizens they represent.
Pedri said he does not expect the new site to go live until 2018 because the administration and company must agree on a layout, identify past and present data that must be imported and train staffers who will be responsible for updating the site from numerous departments.
The current website is difficult for the public to navigate, clunky to update and visually unappealing with too much white space and too few photographs, Pedri said.
Links to past meeting minutes and other records no longer work, prompting complaints from citizens who regularly attend county meetings.
Some department links contain sparse data or, in at least one case, stale information about which manager is in charge.
Keeping the new site loaded with information from all departments will be a priority, Pedri said, noting updates also will reduce the amount of staff time required to convey basic public information.
“Websites are how people communicate in 2017. People go on websites for everything,” he said.
While the county’s available capital funding is dwindling, Pedri believes the website upgrade is worth the investment, saying it will improve customer service and help promote economic development and tourism.
“Other counties have phenomenal, up-to-date websites, and we need to follow suit,” he said. “We need to embrace technology.”
The revamped website also will provide a link to the county’s Facebook page, which was set up in April. To date, the page has attracted 1,648 likes and 1,700 followers. Employees regularly post information about job openings and county events.
According to protocol on the page, the county reserves the right to delete comments and/or ban users for a variety of reasons, including posters who advocate illegal activity, promote particular products or political organizations, or compromise criminal or civil investigations.
The site requests online posters to be courteous and avoid comments that are off-topic, profane, obscene, offensive, sexually explicit, inappropriate or inflammatory.
Pedri said the county has not encountered any problems with outside postings to date.
“We’ve had great feedback from citizens about the page,” he said.
