New Spanish Fork City Website

May 6th, 2003

The new Spanish Fork City website was launched last Friday without problem. There are still a few things I would like to tweak, but they were non show-stoppers. The new site was mostly a re-architecting job to serve as a base for new eGov applications.

Here are a list of some the new features:

  • Dynamic “skinning” system: allows the look of the site to change throughout by switching to a different skin.
  • Web-based control panel: Allows even the most non-technical user update things like news, events, etc.
  • Yard Sale application: The city wanted to cut down on the amount of signs that were being posted for yard sales, so now people can submit their yard sales online to be approved for posting on the website.
  • More powerful forum: The forum software was upgraded to a more robust PHPBB system.
  • Dynamic site index: The site index is dynamically generated ensuring that links are always up to date.
  • Integrated search engine: Originally we were just going to use MyComputer.com’s search engine, but there were limitations and problems with that so I decided to use PHPDig, a small and fast site search engine that is highly customizable.
  • More usable global navigation: Through the top menu, nearly the entire site is categorized and is easily navigable from any page. A standard side navigation is available for linking to relative sub-content.

Overall I am pretty satisfied with the way the site turned out. One thing I regret now though is not using an open source CMS like Plone. There are many features that a CMS provides out-of-box that I had to build myself.

Posted by Brian Sweeting Filed in e-Government
2 Comments »

2 Responses to “New Spanish Fork City Website”

  1. Al Sherwood Says:
    May 7th, 2003 at 1:52 am

    Sent a note to the Spanish Fork Webmaster but thought I would follow up here. I’m the sub-domain registrar for utah.gov and just wanted to let you know about our offer (see webmaster note)Feel free to contact me. 801-538-1195 for further information. Al

  2. J. Niel Strong Says:
    November 5th, 2003 at 7:04 am

    I am a city councilman elect for springville city. who set up your web site? and would you be interested in talking to springville city??? please email me jnscpa@aol.com