February 22, 1999 Web posted at: 6:19 p.m. EST (2319 GMT) by Meg Misenti

From...

(IDG) -- The city of Denver recently unveiled a World Wide Web site designed to secure the city a lead in the pack of municipal governments racing to deploy services to the Internet.

The site, at www.denvergov.org, is being manned by 250 city and county agency employees designated as content authors and editors; they will be responsible for updating the interactive site daily. A bastion of information, into which the city pumped $500,000, the site contains 6,000 pages of content and links to 216 agency sites.

DenverGov replaces the city's first Web site, InfoDenver. City officials are positioning the new site as the proper electronic presence for a city that is ripe with online access. A recent survey showed that Denver citizens' Internet use is higher than that of citizens in most cities. The city also is ramping up its technology resources to define itself as the hub city for the Rocky Mountain technology corridor.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE
	IDG.net home page
Civic.com home page
Get a free subscription to Civic.com's print edition
Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net
IDG.net's personal news page
IDG.net's products pages
Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you
Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletters
Search IDG.net in 12 languages
News Radio
	Fusion audio primers
	Computerworld Minute

Citizens can use DenverGov to search county court civil case dockets, access current data on a property, search job listings and apply online. "People can put their address in and can get as many as 95 pieces of information for that address, including trash pickup, boundaries, recycle, schools, parks, voting precinct," said Byron West, the city's director of Television and Internet Services. Citizens also can request that certain information be pushed automatically to their e-mail accounts.

However, it may be the way the city plans to maintain information on the site, rather than its technical features, that makes DenverGov most innovative. The city's new hand-picked employee-editors directly post and maintain 90 percent of the site's content. "It's a publishing system that puts the power of creating the Web site with the agencies," West said. Employees with no HTML experience can make changes instantly using standard Microsoft Corp. Office products, he added.

The site was built by Mediarite Inc. (www.mediarite.com), a Denver-based Internet consulting firm that is looking to replicate the service for other cities. "This wasn't a typical Web site development project," said company president Bob Schubring. "This was a content publishing system project. We built the back end that lets [agencies] make the Web site happen. Right now, the site has about 10 percent of the content on it that it should. For the investment the city has made, it will get huge returns and will invest no additional money."

When supplying content, agency editors log into an Active Server Page that acts as a front end to the database. The database uses Microsoft' BackOffice and SQL Server to wrap the look and feel of the Web site around locally keyed information. "It gives us a consistent-looking site, but the content is all coming from different places," Schubring said.

Denver also plans to add community kiosks to enhance citizen access. City officials have yet to add all the services they plan to offer through the site, but officials plan to poll users on future enhancements.