WILTON — Wilton Town Manager Perry Ellsworth reported to the select board on Tuesday, Feb. 7, the current state of the town website and its ongoing update.
“Website is a mess. It about can’t be fixed without spending lots of money,” Ellsworth stated to the board. He requested drawing money from ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funds to have the website fixed.
The current state of the website is “out for maintenance,” Ellsworth stated. “Our website is basically down right now. We’re not doing anything with it.”
The update has been in progress as recently as last December, with the intent of overhauling the website and having the administration for it be in house with staff at Wilton’s Town Office.
Ellsworth used Jay’s website as a model for what they envision as Wilton’s webpage.
“If you look at Jay’s website, it’s pretty good and easy to handle and easy to add information,” he stated.
Ellsworth has experience with the cost of updating websites from previous town manager positions he held and used those as his examples. “One was $15,000, and the other one is $23,000,” he said.
According to Ellsworth, Jay’s website cost them roughly $7,500.
Selectperson Tiffany Mauri offered her input on the website, suggesting they restore the website to a state where it was previously functional and train their staff to update the information on the website themselves. Mauri even offered her services to accomplish the task.
“I’m extremely familiar with this,” she said. “This is my area of expertise, and this is what I do for work.”
“What I hear you say is you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Chairperson David Leavitt said.
Leavitt asked Mauri for a time frame in which she could review the website and determine how to fix it before the board decides to seek an outside party to take over the webpage. Mauri gave until the next select board meeting.
Ellsworth offered the current web development’s email address for the two to correspond with each other.
“We’ll work with it, see if we can get the website back to where it was,” Mauri stated. “Because if we can, at that point there, I’m willing to spend time to train the staff. [I’ll] spend two hours a week until the staff is fully trained to do this. And now we can save the town money and not go through a website redesign.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
