A website isn’t anything new - well, not for most of the members of a co-op ready to launch the first in a series of revamped municipal sites this week.

“Some didn’t have them,” admits Bob Ashley, Berwick chief administrative officer and the chairman of a provincial co-op of municipal units working on a common website design. “A lot of us - especially the smaller ones, with no IT department - shipped them out originally and the sites were one-offs, quickly out-of-date with nobody to maintain them. This is just way better.”

The municipalities—14 in all—teamed up almost five years ago and came up with an early template for municipal information, contacts and calendars, but Ashley says there was a recognized need “to try and increase public engagement” - and bring municipal websites “into the 21st Century.” In the last year or so, the co-op searched out web designers as far as British Columbia and then hired a project staffer and combined resources with Service Nova Scotia and the Association of Municipal Administrators.

The results - a Joomla-based, cutting edge content management system - is ready to go for the first two units, Berwick (www.berwicknovascotia.com) and Argyle. “I’m enthusiastic about this - I was out over the holidays in the snow taking pictures of the town to put up,” Ashley says...

http://www.novascotiabusinessjournal.com/index.cfm?sid=99501&sc=107