Riverhead Town looks to revamp its website; include live streaming
Video clips of Riverhead Town Board meetings are now being posted to the town’s website, riverheadli.com.
And town officials are hoping to get the site redesigned and upgraded as well, with an eye toward live-streaming meetings.
Over the past week, the town began adding links to Town Board video clips next to the agendas, which contain all board resolutions and vote results, as well as word-for-word meeting minutes.
The videos only go back as far as the beginning of this year, while the agendas go back as far as 2002 and the minutes as far as 2000.
The town recently sought proposals to redesign the website and received four responses.
A Missouri-based company called Municipal CMS LLC submitted a proposal to redesign the site for $12,495 and to host it for $2,400 per year and town officials say they are leaning toward that proposal. The town currently pays $1,100 per year for its website.
The last time the town website was redesigned was in 2004 and that cost $6,000, officials said.
Among the big changes officials are hoping to see include the streaming of live Town Board meetings over the website, time stamping videos so visitors could go directly to a certain point on each recording, allowing individual departments to post information online themselves without having to go through the Information Technology Department and creating a separate website to market the Enterprise Park at Calverton.
“At the time we went to bid, I didn’t even realize we didn’t have an EPCAL website,” Supervisor Sean Walter said. “We want to drive business to EPCAL and to the Town of Riverhead.” That EPCAL site would cost extra, officials said.
Municipal CMS also would allow an option to spread the cost of the site design over three, four or five years, officials said.
