Building a New Site for Bowdoinham

Welcome to the new Bowdoinham site.

The site is live, now, but we still have a lot of work to do in the background, loading the site content and developing new functions and features. You can help:

• Email us if something is broken, confusing, or missing.
• Email us to suggest a new feature that you would find useful.

How the Site is Arranged:

The home page is intended to offer timely announcements, upcoming events, and a little bit about what's in the other sections, in the form of "featured" boxes that will change periodically. Think of it as a snapshot of what's new.

The rest of the site is organized into three main parts:

1. Government: Boards and committees, local ordinances, tax database, and other things pertaining to the town government.
2. Living: Things to do and see in town, local organizations, and other information about life in Bowdoinham.
3. Business: Information about local businesses, events, and ways you can support local businesses.

Tips for Using the New Site:

1. Use the menu on the left to move around the site. Note also the "breadcrumbs" along the top as you move around, which make it simpler to jump back to where you were.
2. Note the "Quick Reference" menu, which contains links directly to certain high-traffic pages.
3. The "Sitemap" is still a bit skeletal, but provides some direct links to major features and functions.
4. Site Search is very powerful. You can find practially anything on the site quickly using this tool.

In building a new town web site, we wanted to accomplish several things:

• Make it simpler to post new content to the site.
  • We did this by switching to Drupal, a contemporary, highly-supported open source content management system.
    • Drupal is a "cutting edge" software application for developing websites.
    • It is supported by software developers all over the world, who are constantly developing new functions and improving on existing ones.
    • "open source" means we can change the application code -- but in most cases, including Drupal, it also means that the software is free.
• Empower the town staff to post all different kinds of content, without the need to rely on a "webmaster" to post things.
  • Drupal is designed to allow users with the proper permissions to control site content using a simple interface.
• Create an environment that will allow us to post much more than was feasible in the past.
  • The modular functions of Drupal allow us to add different kinds of site functions when we need them.
• Save money.
  • Drupal is free. Our annual costs are much lower now, since we only need to pay for hosting of the site, instead of also paying a monthly rate to use a proprietary software application.