Time for an upgrade

WALLACE — Earlier this week the Shoshone Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) met with the owners and other representatives from GravisTech to discuss the details of their plans to update the county’s website.

Also in the meeting were representatives from the various departments within the courthouse- a tactical move by the BOCC to ensure that the people who would be maintaining and updating the site would have some say in its conception and design.

“We are stepping back here,” BOCC chairman Mike Fitzgerald said. “This is the county’s website and we want it to be made and built by the people who are going to be using and operating it.”

From there, GravisTech CEO and project lead Sera White began to discuss her detailed plan and where they currently were in that plan.

“What our goal is today is to introduce our team and discuss our schedule,” White said. “As far as the schedule is concerned, today we are going to deliver templates for you to give us feedback on.”

The new website will be constructed using WordPress, a free and open-source content management system that is relatively simple to use and the most common content management system on the internet.

“60 percent of the market share of all websites use WordPress,” GravisTech COO and lead designer Greg Bosen said. “WordPress is used for a lot of government agencies and facilities websites.”

GravisTech will be using a theme on top of the WordPress system, which will allow it to have the ability for quite a bit of no-code changes, which means that changing/updating the website is much simpler and does not require users to be able to write code.

“You won’t need to be a IT or code person to make changes,” Bosen said. “And then if there is anything more complicated that you need or want you can come to us and we can help get that done for you. There are also a lot of relatively inexpensive code modules that will give the site extra or additional functionality.”

Those modules that Bosen mentioned include survey tools, training modules, pay matrixes, and multiple photo galleries.

“To provide a good service to the public this change is absolutely necessary,” Fitzgerald said.

One of the main reasons that this specific type of website is being used is its ease of use.

“We want something that is user friendly, so that regular staff, if they need to update something within their department, can login and make those changes,” Fitzgerald said. “Instead of having to funnel every change through one person, we will be able to have something that each department can use as they need.”

This format will allow the county to not be as dependent upon a technology or website specialist for updates, which could save the county some money.

GravisTech will meet with the BOCC and the county department heads again in the coming weeks to go over concepts and make the final decisions concerning the website’s design.

Earlier this month the BOCC agreed to pay GravisTech $3,932 to develop the new website after soliciting several companies for bids, decided that local company GravisTech was the way to go to bring the website into the future.

“GravisTech provided the County with a client friendly, Silver Valley based proposal to modernize Shoshone County's website,” BOCC chairman Mike Fitzgerald said. “The technology which the current site is based is old and marginally serviceable. Our desire is to modify the existing website such that it is in-line with the times and provides a useful resource as the County moves into the future.”