Selectmen press staff on town website searchability, sticky notices and video embeds

Josh, the town web/IT staff member who briefed the selectmen on June 23, said he has been addressing department concerns and has implemented immediate fixes to improve document searchability on the planning page. He said he added keyworded labels and side widgets so planning documents and forms are easier to find.

During a question-and-answer session, board members pressed for ways to keep time-sensitive items prominent; Josh said departments can add "sticky" notices to pin items at the top of lists and can schedule automatic expiration dates so outdated notices are removed. "When you're producing the content, you can go in and say when do you want this content to expire and they'll just put a date and then it will revoke it automatically," he said.

The board also discussed YouTube integration and embedding videos on a dedicated video page so meeting recordings are easier for residents to find instead of relying on external search. Josh said a YouTube link already appears in the menu and he will explore embedding live/archived meeting video directly on the town site.

On contact and spam concerns, Josh explained he removed direct email addresses from some department pages to reduce spam harvested by web crawlers and instead set up contact forms that route to the town secretary's inbox. He said those contact forms include spam filtering. Board members generally favored the approach but asked Josh to return with answers to a detailed list of items submitted by Joe Hauser.

The discussion produced no vote; the selectmen directed staff to follow up on the list of questions and to prioritize fixes that improve finding meeting materials and timely notices.