New Mineola Village Website to Go Live Friday

Get your last look at the Mineola Village website because on August 10, it will be a part of history in favor of a .

The site, which was first brought online in 2005, has not aged that well, with sliding “boxes” and a notorious interface that sometimes required days for new information to be uploaded and displayed.

“The reason it’s being done on a Friday,” village clerk Joseph Scalero said during a meeting of the on August 1 at the , “I jokingly tell people (it’s) so you have all weekend to sit at home and find every typo that you can hit me with on Monday, but in reality it has more to do with the servers around the world. They have to be directed to the new website and it takes a couple days to propagate that system-wide, so by Monday everybody should be able to access it. Locally you shouldn’t have any issue. Typically it takes a day or two for the world to catch up.”

All of the  for the site are said to be operational at launchtime, with notifications via e-mail being one of the first ones anticipated to get heavy use. The site also has the ability for visitors to download and print out proper forms for permits and applications among like calendar updates and potential acceptance of credit card payments.

“The website was designed to be more user-functional rather than just static displays with information,” Scalero said. “More the ability to do stuff.”

The village clerk noted that there are already 3 people trained on operating the new website and inputting new information. The village’s license allows enough for every department to have one person trained on its operation.

Scalero said that if any visitor to the website sees a broken or misdirected link to please contact his office because “unlike the current site, I can fix it in real-time; I can do it right then. Tell me where you saw it, we’ll go in and fix it, because that’s really the only way we’ll know it’s there.”

The online version of the village code is one feature which will not be ready when the site launches, as it is subject to the coding project “Until we get the village code finalized, I can’t put a link to anything,” Scalero said.

The contractor hired by the village – General Code – to , will also produce an electronic version of the code which will “seamlessly” integrate with the new website, allowing users to search the code via their computers.

“As soon as that code project is done, our code book is live, we can attach it to the website,” Scalero said.

According to village attorney John Spellman, the final comments on the were sent to the company to integrate into their final version. The company will then send it back to the village.

“They gave us a questionnaire of about 20 pages that we had to respond to and give them direction and we hope to see it coming down the pike soon,” Spellman said.

Sclaero added that the estimate he received from the company for a final draft version was about 45 days, putting a couple of months before an electronic version was placed online due to the necessity of a hearing before the board of the recodifycation of the code.

“It’s difficult for anything that has to be reviewed by a human to be put in digitally,” Scalero explained, “because a computer can’t make some of the value decisions that a human can.”

Update: the new site is online at about 8 p.m.