Someone Noticed was pleasantly surprised when we surfed over to the Town of Elkton Website this evening. The town launched a redesigned virtual home at some point over the past several weeks. Although we just discovered the improvement at www.elkton.org, we can already tell you that it is much better than the previous homepage for an improvement was badly needed.
With graphic design enhancements and much better navigation the redesigned website is positioned to do a couple of things. First it creates a quality impression for virtual visitors checking out the town. Second, it’s positioned to serve as a real information portal for citizens needing data from the town. All these basic elements were missing from the old digital home of the town of Elkton, which it replaced.
We congratulate the Town on this improvement. When we first started monitoring Elkton affairs about a year ago, there was an enormous amount of confusion over the expense of the old website and work on the town’s computer network. There cost overruns were staggering, allegedly work wasn’t done properly, and contracts had not been fulfilled, but no one seemed to know where authorization for work was coming from. We were amazed at all that, but we had our hands full with the town’s attempt to sell part of the Elk Landing property so we didn’t have time to investigate the concusing matter. We don’t know if they ever straightened out what went wrong, other than terminating a contract with a vendor.
As best we could figure it out from listening to the confusion at board meetings, the mayor was managing the technology contract in those days and had selected the vendor. Whatever the case, the town has a taken an excellent step forward and is now beginning to enter the 21st century digital information world. We assume management of this project is now being handled by professional staff, since it is such an improvement over the previous rollout. Someone obviously knows what they’re doing with this and we sure didn’t leave town meetings back then thinking that the Mayor and the political leadership had a grip on what was going on. Hopefully over time they will add many of the newest web 2.0 products that most surfers have come to expect from the modern web, but, whatever the case, they’ve taken an excellent first step.
Oh we have one more minor suggestion for the town; they really should issue press releases announcing positive steps whenever they occur.