Over the year, the City’s official website collegeparkmd.gov has grown big and may be a bit bulky and cluttered.
Yet, it lacks quite a few essential features that can be seen on any modern public website.
One of these ‘lacking’ features is the absence of social networking integration. It has become a sort of embarrassment to the City staff that a simple static link to “Follow us on FaceBook / Tweeter” cannot be found on our city’s website. Such a link is quite a common feature in almost all of the websites of our neighboring cities, such as Greenbelt and Hyattsville.
Another feature the City is planning to add is the accessibility support for visually impaired / diabled people. There are fairly established standards in the cyberworld, such as Section 508 compatibility references that give ample guidelines on how to make websites accessible to blind users.
The City staff has found that other neighboring cities have spent around $15,000 on consultants to make these features added to their websites.
City staff Steve Groh and Sarah Price will make a presentation on these issues during the council discussion tonight.