Monroe County moves website to state CMS; technical team reports cleaner site and planned domain migration

Monroe County’s technical services director reported to commissioners on Aug. 14 that the county website has been migrated to the State of Indiana’s content management system after a year-and-a-half effort to clean and restructure content.

“Also with the migration to the state, we were allowed basically a thousand objects in our website. We had 12,000 when we started,” the director said, describing a large-scale cleanup of unstructured material and redirects from the old site to the new pages.

Ben, the county webmaster who led the migration work, told the board the redesign focused on mobile usability and search: “The most this website is user friendly on the cell phones. People use 90% on cell phones.” Commissioners noted the new site is less visually dynamic than the old site but praised improved search functionality. The director said the county has secured the state subdomain monroecounty.in.gov and expects to complete domain migration, including email suffix changes, within about a year.

Why it matters: a consolidated CMS and improved search capability aim to make county services easier to find online; the domain migration will change county email suffixes and require additional planning to avoid broken links or lost emails.

Commissioners asked for notification plans for staff ahead of the email-domain move; the director said a roadmap is being discussed with state officials.