WILTON — Town Manager Perry Ellsworth and Chairperson Tiffany Maiuri gave an update on the status of the town website at the Select Board meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 1.
“We don’t have the capacity to do it in house at this time,” Maiuri told the board. According to Maiuri, despite having done training sessions with the staff to get them up to speed with updating the website, the staff does not have the capacity to keep the website up to date.
“I trained both of them to update the website,” Maiuri stated. “For whatever reason, they’re not able or don’t have enough time or maybe it’s the skill set that they just don’t do it enough.”
“They may not remember how to do it and I spent enough training time here to know that doesn’t seem to be working,” she added.
Maiuri, along with Ellsworth, suggested bringing in a web developer to get the town website up and running and keeping things like the minutes and agendas for Select Board meetings up to date.
Ellsworth also suggested investing more funds into the website and its development.
“Most towns spend between [$2,000 and $3,000] at minimum on their websites annually,” Ellsworth said. “We’ve been spending $500, and so it’s catch up time.”
Ellsworth started the push to redevelop and modernize the website back in December of 2022, using Jay’s website as a model for what he envisions as Wilton’s webpage.
“If you look at Jay’s website, it’s pretty good and easy to handle and easy to add information,” he stated.
Ellsworth provided an update on the website in February, with him confessing to the board that things were not going to plan with the redesign.
“Website is a mess. It can’t be fixed without spending lots of money,” Ellsworth stated before declaring the website “out for maintenance” as he searched for possible solutions to the issues.
Maiuri offered her help in restoring the website to its original, functional state. Former Chairperson David Leavitt asked Maiuri for a time frame in which she could review the website and determine how to fix it before the board decides to seek an outside party to take over the webpage. Maiuri gave until the next select board meeting.
In early March, Maiuri and Ellsworth offered an update to the website to the board.
“There’s some improvement,” Ellsworth stated, “Everything I look at it, it’s gained a little bit more.”
Maiuri added, “So at this point here, we did connect with the hosting provider, we rolled back our pages to the original structural design and I updated what I knew from being in this position here.”
Maiuri stated that she was willing to work directly with office staff to maintain the website moving forward and keep the maintenance in house. Ellsworth stated that staff requested time with Maiuri to learn more about the maintenance of the webpage.
“I think we’d like to have a couple of hours of your time,” he stated, “where you could set up with the staff upstairs and talk about what it is that they think needs to be fixed or what the priorities are that need to be fixed.”
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