Rome, Floyd County To Merge… Online
By RNW Staff Writer Dawn Treglown
City and county officials announced on Tuesday that the city-county collaborative website should be up and running sometime in May.
At the Rome/Floyd County Joint Services Committee meeting, Rome Public Information Officer Jennifer Collins told committee members that a Calhoun-based web design company has been chosen for the development of the new collaborative website for the city and county.
The new domain name will be www.romefloyd.com, however two other domain names were also purchased: www.romefloyd.us and www.romefloyd.gov.
Collins explained, “We bought these three domains because we don’t want somebody else purchasing them later.”
She said if that happened, the purchaser could have a site that might be misleading to visitors, especially if it contained derogatory content.
Collins said one of the other domains could also be used in an ad, and then traffic from the ad to the listed website could be used to determine the effectiveness of the ad.
She said the website design company works with an open source framework, which means that once the site is built, the governments can grow as the technology grows.
“We are looking at outside hosting options,” she told the committee, adding that the option was not really being considered until closer inspection.
She said the current server costs $20,000, and the servers are usually outdated with three or four years. An outside hosting option was found that will only cost the city and county $600 per year, combined.
“The hosting is actually done through the web design company and hosted on a server in Texas,” Collins said.
Floyd County Public Information Officer Joy Peterson said the outside hosting decision made good sense.
“For our IT departments, which are already overloaded with work, this is not going to amount to extra work for them, plus they will no longer have the responsibility of keeping the server updated.”
“This is truly groundbreaking,” she said, “There’s only one other city-county collaboration in Georgia that is not consolidated that’s doing it and maybe a handful in the whole country.”
She said the idea was conceived so the city and county could be more customer service based.
Peterson said after the site design has begun, a citizen focus group will be formed to look at it and comment on its effectiveness.
Committee members suggested the group should be comprised of some one from the business sector, industry sector and personal sector including realtors, construction people and developers.
Collins said she also hopes that a design will be able to be incorporated into the software that will allow a visitor to list an address and available services be given.
“If there’s a module within the content management system that we’re using that will let us do that, then we will do it,” she said.
The project budget will come to $13,145, with the city paying $6,573 and the county paying the other $6,573.
Of the $13,145, $9,000 will go toward website design and the first year of maintenance; $600 will fund the first year of hosting; $1,500 will fund the website launch; $500 will cover training manual costs; $45 covers the three domain name registrations and $1,500 will fund stock photography.
Annual recurring costs will amount to $3,345, with the city and county paying $1,673. The $3,345 covers maintenance at $1,200; hosting at $600; domain name registration for $45 and stock photography for $1,500.
A series of press releases and public service announcements will be generated leading up to the product launch.
Peterson said the website will be a great addition to the local governments.
“This truly represents a unified front,” she said.
