Published: September 05, 2007 08:06 am      

The face of our community

Before long, government Web sites will be the face of our communities.

Those looking to move to the area to raise their families, retire or even just to vacation already are checking out the area online. As the possibilities develop, citizens may be able to pay taxes, register their cars and more just by clicking a button.

Both Richmond City Manager David Evans and Berea Communications Coordinator Dale VanWinkle agreed that their municipal Web sites are important pieces of the city-marketing puzzle. Madison County Web designer Chris Israel could not be reached Tuesday for comment about the county’s Web site.

“I think that anytime people think about coming here on vacation, anytime an industry is think about locating here, a business is thinking about locating here, people maybe Google 'Richmond, Ky.' and come across our Web site,” Evans said. Links on the site’s home page to all the other departments gives people a “flavor of the city.”

Berea’s economic developer has tweaked some things to make sure all the forms and information packets available on the city’s site are available in formats people can fill out and use so they don’t have to make a special trip to City Hall, VanWinkle said.

“We try to make it a tool where people can find as much as they can,” he said. “It is still a constantly growing project. It takes a long time to get everything on there. We are constantly adding new things. Whenever we have a public hearing coming up that has a fairly large document, we have it in draft form for citizens to look at. That way we don’t have to do a lot of printing either and it keeps our printing costs down.”

Richmond has had its current Web site design for about five years, Evans said. In contrast, VanWinkle estimated Berea’s design is about a year and a half old. While Berea’s site was designed by an outside agency, the city now has the software to maintain it.

“We try to do just the basic framework of it, but then over time it has grown just by people saying, ‘Can we do this? Can we do that?’” VanWinkle said.

Richmond’s site is internally maintained, Evans said, by an employee who has other duties with the city as well. Recently, the city acquired an Eastern Kentucky University co-op student to assist with the site’s maintenance. About 10 city employees underwent training last month to learn Web design as well, Evans said.

Dr. Carolyn Siegel, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who specializes in Internet marketing, had several suggestions as to how the local governments could develop their sites to better serve the citizens as well as those out-of-towners looking for information about our communities.

• Highlight retirement options: “It seems to me that either Richmond or Berea or both have been mentioned as really outstanding places to retire,” Siegel said. “They might want to incorporate something about that in their links. (Phone) numbers to places in the county retirees could easily find housing and education.”

The same information also would be good for families looking to relocate to the area, she said.

• Reach the Hispanic population: “I think both cities and the county need to think about as their Hispanic population increases, they need to start thinking about putting ‘en Espanol.’ They need contacts for Spanish-speaking tourists or citizens,” Siegel said.

• Show videos: “Get people out with video cams,” Siegel said. “At the Pottery Fair, somebody needs to be out there with a video camera walking around and let people get a feel for it. It doesn’t take that much bandwidth and 70-percent of the country has broadband. It makes a tremendous impact. They don’t have to be long — well under five minutes — just to give a taste of what’s happening to let people know these are vibrant communities.”

• “... Cincinnati, Ohio, (www.cincinnati-oh.gov) does it best with a tool bar that allows people to click on links to what they want to do. The action-oriented site targets specific audiences and divides things up into boxes for people based on what they have come to the site to do."

Kelly Foreman can be reached at kforeman@richmondregister.com or 624-6694.