Web site contract awarded to Kansas firm

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The City of McCook will soon have a new presence on the Internet.

The McCook City Council Monday night approved to authorize city staff to negotiate a $14,994 contract with Civic Plus of Manhattan, Kan., to upgrade the city's Web site.

The city received three proposals for the Web site redesign. One did not meet requirements and another came in over budget at $28,615.

The contract with Civic Plus will provide emergency support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and also includes: training and documentation, design production, content development and registering the site with all major search engines. Annual maintenance will be $260 monthly or $3,000 annually, with start-to-finish time to complete the Web site at 18 to 22 weeks.

Items on the site will include online job applications, opinion polls, a photo gallery up to 50 photos and quick links

Councilman Aaron Kircher said he wanted the City of McCook to have a Facebook page, that could be linked to the city's Web site.

He also asked if the site could take online payments. City Clerk Lea Ann Doak said online payments of city bills would be possible in the future, when an agreement with PayPal is completed.

Kircher also recommended that one person in each department be responsible for updating its section, instead of one person for the entire site.

Streaming videos of city council meetings are not available now but may be in the future, City Clerk Lea Ann Doak this morning.

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  • Wish I knew about this. That's some serious coin for what it appears they're getting. Most of this appears to be cookie cutter stuff, so there isn't a whole lot of real work needing done.

    -- Posted by norm on Tue, Apr 6, 2010, at 12:53 PM
  • Really? A new website? Where are the City's priorities? Oh, Kircher wants the City to be "hip, new, fresh, exciting" and Facebook? This is exactly why the newspapers in this country are failing. Cities and businesses should be spending their money locally with newspapers and radio instead of "social networking". The government has no business belong to "social networking sites". This should be left to the Chamber of Commerce for advertising purposes. What positive thing can come out of a new website or Facebook? Why couldn't the City have gone to MCC and allowed the webdesigners to update? At least this would have been alot more cost effective and LOCAL!

    -- Posted by FNLYHOME on Tue, Apr 6, 2010, at 1:32 PM
  • The more places a cities name is place the higher chance a buisness has to see the city and look at bringing jobs to it. Also, the goals of a City and the goals of a chamber of commerce are not 100% the same. Plus facebook is free to join and maintain.

    Social networking also is not killing newspapers and radio. People who stop listening to radio or subscribing to the newspaper is. Then again, when I can find 100 articles online about some event 15 minutes after if happened rather then wait til the next day for the newspaper to print it off.

    Let alone the new forms of communication coming out so we can get accurate eye wittness events from the people at the event just as quick.

    Newspaper is becoming a victim of new, faster technology. much like buggy whips, typewriters, feather pens, and wooden teeth.

    -- Posted by npwinder on Tue, Apr 6, 2010, at 4:07 PM
  • Why would we want government to limit the ways they will provide us information? A new website can be used to issue warnings to anyone visiting the site, send those warnings directly to anyone's email as soon as it's posted so they are informed i.e. another convict escapes or there is a situation at the school, can provide information to people on what steps are necessary for a project they may be working on and offers one more method for a citizen to ask a question or raise a concern, just to name a few benefits. The website they have now is rarely updated and is very limited in the information it provides.

    Facebook is used by a lot of people and if the city has a Facebook page and people add that city page to their list then all those updates also show up directly on that person's Facebook page. One person gets the warning from Facebook and spreads the information to their friends with a simple click of a button and they send it to all their friends and so on, just like chain letters except this will actually be spreading important information that the city needs people to know about. People check their Facebook pages daily if not, hourly. The Internet is right up there with radio and tv as far as instantly providing important information to the public except that the internet doesn't require the person to tune in at the exact time the update is made. It stays on that page, in case they missed a radio update.

    Of course, you can argue whether people should turn to Facebook or other Internet sites for information but the fact is they do and our city should adapt to this fact as a way to better serve its citizens. I highly doubt the city would stop using the newspaper to publish notices or information to citizens nor did I see that anyone said they would stop using radio either. This is just another important and effective tool to accompany newspaper and radio.

    Newspapers are failing because people are changing the way they want to get information. Some are trying to adapt to the changes. For a perfect example, you don't have to look any further than the Gazette. I don't know if it will be enough or not since I don't see their bottom line but I hope it is. I don't want to see newspapers to go by the wayside either but I definitely don't want our government to be ignore the changing times either.

    -- Posted by hometown1 on Tue, Apr 6, 2010, at 4:19 PM
  • I have no problem with the redo of the site. Online payments would be great. Facebook sounds fine to me too. $15k is laughable.

    -- Posted by norm on Tue, Apr 6, 2010, at 7:08 PM
  • sounbds like my grandpa when he used to complain about those "NEw Fangled" things that were ruining this country.

    Fact is Newspapers are killing themselves with their biased reporting and the fact we can get our info 24/7 from canle news and the net. Get with the times it is actually the 21st century not the 20th anymore.

    -- Posted by Chaco1 on Wed, Apr 7, 2010, at 8:28 PM
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