Through the Blog Together site I found news that the Town of Chapel Hill had won a web "extreme makeover" from a Kansas company called Civic Plus.

This is a completely free deal for the Town of Chapel Hill; when I first read the news, I thought that was pretty cool cause the current Chapel Hill website really stinks.

But after visiting Civic Plus, reading the thread on Orange Politics and notes from Paul Jones, and skimming over the Chapel Hill memorandum that is serving as the general plan for the new site, I would have to think this "extreme makeover" solution isn't really a solution at all.

In my short experience and based on the general vibe I'm getting from the memorandum (and the general atmosphere of Chapel Hill and Carrboro) I have to wonder how Civic Plus is going to solve any of the problems from the existing site.

Here are the issues as I see them:

• On the frontend, can Civic Plus provide a clean, standards-compliant design? Their own website is not HTML 4.01 compliant. On aesthetics, Civic Plus fails horribly (although this is not a huge issue).
• An even larger concern beyond standards is whether Civic Plus can provide a usability-oriented site. Given the wide demographic of users that an e-government site must be accessible to, the site must be very easy to use. This is a tangential concern, since it's been my experience that standards-oriented designers/developers also are usually strong proponents of usable design
• TownOfChapelHill.org's primary internal concern is archiving all its datas. It looks like they'll be giving a lot of thought on how to store the data - this system will be used for decades to come and must be flexible and stable enough to last the test of time. Ideally the system and architecture designed for the site will last decades (and will make overhauls in the future as trivial as possible). Can Civic Plus support the new storage methods of the documents? Given the scope of the project, I would think that designing the system around the data would be much preferable than hacking the data around an existing system.
• This is somewhat trivial - but I was not happy to see .aspx as the extention to filenames in Civic Plus. My friends know I'm a Microsoft fanboy, but any system that uses .aspx gets a minus in my book (although the Mono project is making developing these projects on a Linux platform much easier). I would think that a progressive town like Chapel Hill would support open-source platforms - come on, use LAMP!

If the true goal of TownOfChapelHill.org is to become a greater internet force, allowing citizens to participate more in e-governance, and to have a system that will last decades... I really can't see how this Civic Plus deal will benefit the town of Chapel Hill. If anything, this will limit the scope of what can and cannot be done ("Can we have this awesome feature?" "No - Civic Plus doesn't support it).

Bite the bullet, tap into the talented pool of developers in this area, and develop a truly standards-compliant, user-oriented system that embraces open-source platforms and doesn't compromise any cool e-governance features for the sake of fitting the mold of an existing system.

In my opinion, this deal with Civic Plus is only going to distract the people in charge of the TownOfChapelHill.org website to fit into the mold of Civic Plus when their concerns should be elsewhere. Two years free? Seems like two years wasted to me.