By Police Chief
BRANDON Perkins
Special to The Citizen

Having a useful, informative online presence is virtually required for local governments in today’s technically savvy society, no matter how many citizens they serve, and the Town of Tyrone recognizes that. The Town’s website (www.tyrone.org), which began as a humble one page site with a few lines of text and two photos in 1998, now contains over 80 pages of information and takes up over 5 gigabytes of space on its web server. Not bad for a Town of only 7,000 residents.

After the previous website was hacked in 2008, which eventually resulted in a crash and nearly total data loss, several Town employees collaborated on the new design. The group had worked with the old site and all had ideas for improvement based on their experience and citizen input so they worked together towards the goal of providing their citizens and visitors with a product that offers an abundance of information, easy navigation, and a few “extras” not normally experienced from a smaller municipality. The new design process also included a newer and more stable open-source (no cost) content management system that allows the employees to log in at any time to add pages, edit text, and upload photos which saves time and money because it cuts out the need to hire a webmaster.

So how much information and functionality can one expect to find on a website that was designed by employees with little to no programming knowledge and cost virtually nothing to implement? Citizens can find details about each Town department, review and download Council and Planning Commission meeting agendas and minutes, pay a fine, sign up for public safety alerts, review crime stats, request a vacation house watch, sign up for recreation classes, get news and updates about the Town, download documents, submit a service request, and request an item to be included on a Council agenda. This list is not all inclusive, but you get the idea. Future additions will include the ability to sign up to be automatically notified via email when user-defined areas of the website are updated.

Government websites with similar functionalities cost up to $3,000 or more in design and software fees on top of monthly hosting costs. Tyrone’s “Powered by Employees” website costs its citizens just over $100 per year to operate.
Visit Tyrone’s website at http://www.tyrone.org today to see all that it has to offer.

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