SHARE THIS

For those of you that tired of visiting WestEastonBorough.org and finding the same landing page for 3 years that read, “We are in the process of updating our information. Please come back and check out our new look!” , there is light at the end of the tunnel.

For those that tired of visiting this website and disagreed with anything I wrote, there is relief coming for you, as well.

On January 11th, The West Easton Council approved my spending up to $500 for me to build a new website for West Easton. The money will pay for a hostserver for 3 years of service, and the new domain name, WestEastonBorough.com (which is different than, “.org”) for 10 years.

As it turns out, the cost will be much less than the $500 allotted. Far less than the $2000 line item found in the 2016 budget, for an outside source to build it for us.

3 years of hosting was purchased for $197. In about 60 days, when the registrar holding the .com domain releases it for transfer (a new purchase can’t be transferred until this waiting period is reached), an additional 9 years of ownership of the .com domain will cost approximately $120. That amounts to about $106/year for the website.

There won’t be another payment due until 2019 to keep the website live and at that time only the hosting service will need to be renewed for another 3 year term.

The WestEastonBorough.org domain was prepaid, by Mayor Gross, in January 2015 for a 10-year term. There is 9 years remaining on it, at which time it should be renewed. It was a wise purchase, because it guaranteed that control of the .org domain would remain under West Easton’s ownership and prevents some Russian or Chinese hacker type from building a mirror site with malware filled links on it.

Eventually, no matter which domain (.com or .org) is typed into the address bar of your browser, you will end up at the .com website. That’s due to being able to “forward” a domain to another domain by changing a setting available with the registrar of the domain. (You may have experienced “forwarding” before, if you ever typed a domain name in your browser’s address bar and ended up arriving at a website with a completely different name.)

I am only now getting started on building WestEastonBorough.com. You will find an “Under Construction” notice, but I plan on giving sneak previews occasionally, so that you can follow its progress. The first preview will be on Saturday, January 23rd, beginning at 9am.

I should point out that this new and official West Easton website is owned by West Easton Borough. I am not the owner, so it won’t contain the occasional controversial opinion pieces I sometimes provide on this website. It’s strictly a borough business website. I’m only working on building it, but the following will be some planned features:

Borough Information
Events Calendar
Contact List
Elected Officials Information
Approved Council Minutes
Newsletters
Emergency Notices (as they occur)
Community Announcements
Employment Opportunities (when available)
Permit Applications
Links To County and State Websites

All of the above may not necessarily be completed when the website goes live, but I’ll try to get as much done as possible. I believe I can have a fairly decent website completed after putting about 50 hours of time working on it. Hopefully, in the years that follow and as time permits, you might have access to other information, such as Borough Ordinances. That will all be up to future councils to decide what they want to include and how much time they wish to dedicate to it.

Eventually, my control of the website should be given to a Borough Manager, who I will show how to navigate the administrative side of it. A Borough Manager should be in charge of it and determine what is and is not appropriate on the website, rather than an elected official. I would also be required to submit items to the Borough Manager for approval (I could easily override any restrictions set in place for everyone else, but will not).

In the near future I will write about how this official borough website can not only save the borough over $1000/yr, but also add additional monies to the town coffers. I will let you know how you can help in meeting those goals.