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Southern NH town Web sites are a mixed bag

By Jarret Bencks
jbencks@eagletribune.com
Published: June 2, 2009

With some towns choosing to maintain their Web sites with Town Hall employees and others relying on volunteers, municipal Web sites are managed with varying degrees of success.

Towns such as Atkinson, Kingston and Hampstead have volunteers updating content — and their sites are lagging behind.

As of Friday, the main page on Hampstead's Web site hadn't been updated in 18 days. Minutes from the selectmen's meetings hadn't been posted since 2008. In Kingston, minutes from meetings aren't posted to the site, and the most recent notice posted to the front page was for Hazardous Waste Day on May 9. Atkinson has a similar post as its most recent.

According to Sally Theriault, the Hampstead selectmen's administrative assistant, Town Hall gets frequent complaints from residents who say they can't find things on the Web site or the content is dated.

"There's no real policy as to when things get on to the Web site," she said.

Hampstead has formed a committee that Theriault is serving on to look into having the site professionally revamped and set policy for updating content. No timeline has been set for either goal.

Hampstead is only one of a slew of area towns that let their Web site content go stale.

Pelham has a PDF file of the town's 2009 Town Meeting warrant tagged as new. Salem hasn't posted Board of Selectmen minutes since March, Planning Board minutes since February, and Budget Committee minutes since last year.

But not all towns have lagging web content.

In Londonderry, there has been a recent push to try to get minutes from the selectmen's meetings posted online within five days of the meeting being held, according to Carolyn O'Connor, administrative support specialist. As part of her job, O'Connor updates the town's Web site and posts meeting minutes when they are forwarded to her.

Derry recently overhauled the aesthetics of its Web site, which features upcoming meetings and another with links to town news. The most recent minutes from a Town Council meeting are from May 5.

Windham has two town employees capable of posting content, with minutes from selectmen's meetings published online as quickly as they are received, and minutes from other meetings published to the Web about once per month.

Eric Delong, director of IT/GIS for Windham, said the process isn't very difficult and takes about 10 minutes to do for a batch of meetings. When he finds out about an upcoming event or a public notice, it goes up on the site as quickly as possible.

"If there is an upcoming event, it's going to go up ASAP," Delong said. "It isn't so much a policy as it is an understanding that if something is timely it will get up quickly."

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