As announced at the Lowndes County Commission meeting on Tuesday, the new county website was available this morning. I took a little self tour and then started sending in comments to County Clerk Paige Dukes. Paige has been responsive in answering my questions and comments and I heartily suggest to everyone that you take a look around and then send in your comments.

A few things I’ve noticed so far.

You can look at the web site without creating an account but if you create yourself an account then you can sign up to get notifications about a variety of topics. One annoying thing is that for each thing you sign up for you have to “reconfirm” with a url that is sent to you. This isn’t the county’s fault, it is by design of the service provider (civicplus) list service implementation. The mail comes from “listserv@civicplus.com” but it’s not clear if they are actually using the oh so 1990’s mailing list software of listserv. Anyway, be prepared to click a bunch of links to confirm each list:

Just one more step.

Lots of new material on the web site including agendas for the Greater Lowndes Planning Commission.

Finding the commission minutes is a bit tricky, they are stashed in the “Document Center” and in the “Agenda Center”. In the “Agenda Center” there is a tiny column that says “Minutes” that has a little green check box. Some of the items are labelled “Board of Commissioners Meeting Agenda” and some “Board of Commissioners Meeting Agenda and Minutes” but some that don’t say minutes have them anyways on that little box.

Agendas and Minutes

Over on the right there is a download button that offers options of “html, pdf, packet” but all of them are just different routes to pdf versions of the minutes.

I was hoping that the “packet” option would reveal the packets but maybe that will happen starting in 2015!

There are a few little glitches when moving around in the document center, like the county clerk area says there are “No records to display” but claims that I am at 401 - 26 of 26.

Items 401 – 26 of 26

But again, those problems probably aren’t the fault of the county but rather of the service provider. I’m sure the contract with civicplus has a clause about how timely they will be about fixing things like this.

Again, I encourage everyone to check out the new county web site and send comments/corrections/problems to the County Clerk Paige Dukes at pdukes@lowndescounty.com . And as a final note, it already has more information than the old site.

-Gretchen

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