Mineola Unveils New Preliminary Village Website Design

For several months the Village of Mineola has let out scant details about a for the village government, only finally letting residents have a small peek under the tarp at a recent meeting of the .

Village clerk Joseph Scalero said that he had hoped to do a demo as a but “it’s taken longer than expected because of a lot of the work that needed to be done abandoning the old site and going to the new one.”

Still, he gave a slideshow presentation on the new website during the June 6 meeting at the , detailing where he hopes the village will be by the end of June and noting that the village will still have to add content to the site, emphasized the representation is “not final.”

“We opted for a more simple format,” Scalero said, “more in keeping with what you’d see in other local governments as well as private sector websites. The key is functionality and features, not bells and whistles and not fancy design.”

The new design eliminates the “sliding boxes” on the old website, which were reportedly the number one complaint from users, in favor of drop-down boxes with links and would also have an active calendar.

“On day one there may not be a lot in there; it’s something you add to on a daily basis,” Scalero said.

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Each day’s events would be highlighted on the calendar and everything on the new site can be updated in-house by staff members who have already been trained in how to complete such tasks.

“We’ll have it initially by two or three people who are capable of doing it,” Scalero said. “My hope is to ultimately open that up and have a person from each department who can list those department’s events.”

Events would be limited to village business and those held at village facilities.

Another common complaint from users was difficulty finding where to go for information such as a department or contact information.

“If you need a birth certificate, that’s the registrar’s which is listed under the clerk’s office,” Scalero said. “As an outsider you’re looking for something that says ‘birth certificate,’ you wouldn’t know to look in the village clerk’s office or the registrar’s. So the new website provides me a link, ‘how do I get a birth certificate?’ so people will be able to see it.”

The village clerk noted that the new site is “written in plain language” and also includes contact information for personnel. “Instead of calling up and getting transferred two or three times you’ll be able to go on the website and see where the contacts are,” he said, noting that the village has “not worked out the logistics of” the clickable contact system “because we’re required to keep records of that.”

There would be an additional links section for other departments, such as an ‘accounts payable’ link so those entities who do business with the village can download forms rather than have staff fax them over to their offices, thus saving time. Other forms such as invoices, tax exempt status and any permit form from the building department along with instructions could also be downloaded off the site, though the forms must still be submitted to the village in person.

The old board pages will be replaced with new pages along with contact information and biographies. The old “scrolling news box” – which was added after the initial website launched – was limited to only a blurb and a link out.

“I never realized until this went live that how many people hate scrolling features,” Scalero said. “You either have to watch this thing go around and maybe hit the ‘refresh’ button and start over again and there’s no way to go backwards and forwards that will be gone but the features will remain.”

The new news box can have up to five links displayed at once “but we can store an unlimited amount,” Scalero said. “We can have continual news items there, whatever announcements you want to make.”

The village clerk also noted that the banner photos at the top of the homepage could change over time, suggesting that the photos could change to reflect the passage of seasons throughout the year.

One of the most powerful features of the new website is that of a subscription service. Residents will be able to go onto the website and sign up for e-mail alerts and releases on “virtually any topic at any time,” Scalero explained. These alerts can be meeting and event notices, as well as snow and other weather-related ordinances. Users would have the ability to choose only the alerts and e-mails that they wish to receive on topics of their choice. They can also receive the information by text message, the only difference being that the text message has a limited amount of characters whereas an email does not. There is no need to “sign up” for an account as users can just fill out two or three lines on an online form.

An “emergency news banner” can also be placed on the homepage if there is a need to alert people immediately in an event, such as a hurricane.

“Not only can we put a line up there that grabs people’s attention but it’s clickable and it will bring you to another page where you can put a full unlimited amount of information so we can put emergency numbers, we can list emergency numbers, we can put descriptions,” Scalero said.

The site is also designed to be usable on a standard smartphone.

“Theoretically they should be able to get the information they’re looking for at the website within two or three clicks,” Scalero said. “That’s our goal and I think it’s a reasonable one.”

said that he had asked the village clerk to make the new site available to the public as soon as possible “without waiting for everything to be solidified. We can update it and approve it as we go along. But I want this up and running as quickly as possible.”

The website would also include an which would be completely searchable. However, the code is currently and cannot be added to the website until the process is complete, sometime in early to mid July according to Sclalero’s estimation. The village board also has to vote on the recodified version with the electronic version having a two-week turnaround for integration onto the website.