Clicking on Cob Webs? Not here.

The Morning Call has a story on Municipal Web sites and specifically mentions Lower Nazareth Township's lack of information or highly outdated information and quotes Joe Greene, who created a public site for Lower Nazareth with current information as a result (read the article here).

It got me thinking about the state of our local municipalities sites. To date, as best I can tell, Tatamy and Stockertown have no municipal site, however, Chris Moren of Tatamy started a blog on municipal affairs in March and has made postings since then to keep residents updated (visit his site here).

Lower Nazareth: As noted in the article Joe Greene has a site and he also has a blog where residents can comment on issues (visit the site here). The municipal site (available here) is close to worthless in terms of information. They do list when meetings are held (first Monday, etc), but the events calendar is from 2005. They have a list of parks, but not linked to maps to show where they are. The township officials page which is a phone and email list is the most informative page on the site. Citizens who wish to be informed should be thankful for Joe's site.

Bushkill: The home page (visit the site here) has a holiday calendar from 2006 and key news from summer of 2007. The list of officials only has names, no phone or email and the contact us page is a form you fill out and submit. There is some general zoning information, but it is reasonably generic. A phone list page has very generic information. Similar to Lower Nazareth, Bushkill's site is virtually worthless.

Nazareth: Nazareth re-launched its web site last year and so far has done a good job of keeping it updated (visit the site here). They include the most recent agenda and minutes from Council meetings and on the home page is a list of calendar items from a variety of groups and organizations. I do hope they will take the next step as Upper Nazareth has done and begin to include information on zoning, permits, utilities and information that people need to know. All-in-all much better than the other sites viewed so far.

Upper Nazareth: Launched last year, I made a post at the time for reader feedback. While some thought the design and layout was 'old HTML' and not very current, the township surprised me with the value of its content (visit the site here). For instance, the New Residents page has information (detailed) on permits, ordinances, filing complaints, voting, drivers license, tax information, utilities and more. Planning Commission and Zoning have their own pages with information - outside the supervisor meetings, these are often the most important ones. While the budget for 2008 has been posted, I noticed the Agenda page is for 2007. Hopefully they will keep the site updated as it is the best of those in the NASD region.

So that is a round up of the municipal sites. In Nazareth constant questions about the site by residents eventually led to the redesign. Today's technologies make it so easy for multiple people to post content without having any html experience or knowledge that it shouldn't be difficult for our local government bodies to create places for residents to get the information they need to know now.

Would like to know what you think of these sites and most importantly what information should they have that they don't currently? What is most important for residents?