Flint Township View

Trustee heading up committee to revamp township website




DAVISON TWP. — A committee has been formed by the township board to look at a redesign of the township’s website.

Trustee Lori Tallman is heading up the committee, which is also comprised of Treasurer Tim Green and Parks and Recreation Director Casey Reed and other volunteers.

Tallman told the board Feb. 8 the process would take more than a month and in re-evaluating the website, she said the committee hopes to make it more useful and user-friendly.

“We know that’s going to take more than a month to correct a few things we want to do,” said Supervisor Jim Slezak. “I think it will go fairly quickly.”

Tallman said Reed sent a list of the parks and recreation needs for the website and she said she reached out to the primary departments for their feedback.

“It became pretty apparent pretty quickly this all got initiated by the desire to put PDFs forms online and the cost of that is – I was pretty surprised at the cost of that,” she said. “So, I think it’s going to be better to build that into the overall website redesign.”

She said the committee has identified several providers and they’ve investigated integrating some kind of email and texting into the proposed website redesign.

Tallman said what the committee is looking at is like Constant Contact, an email provider, allowing departments within the township to send out notices to residents, who could opt-in, or out, of the messaging they want or don’t want to receive.

She said preliminary cost estimates for the new website and expanded email services are “substantial” so the board will have to work on the budget this year to see how they’ll pay for the redesign.

Tallman said there will be another meeting of the committee later in February to start laying out ideas and desires for the website.

“We’ll look at the scope of what we want the website to contain and then we’ll look at providers and get some estimates,” she said.