By Shaun Szkolnik
For The Tribune
ARGO – The Argo City Council heard from Dona Bonnet of ADR Business and Marketing Strategies Monday night in reference to building a new website for the city.
“The city of Argo had asked me to provide a quote to you for a new website,” Bonnet said. “I took a look at your website and it is a little dated. It does have some broken links and I feel like we could greatly improve it. Another thing that I would recommend is that we move it more from just an informational website to more of a marketing tool. I could work with you on content to actually showcase your city, as well as provide needed information.
“The proposal that you have is for $2,499 for the basic website that includes 21-25 web pages, being comparable to what you have now, as well as adding a SSL certificate for security on the website. Currently, you don’t have one that has the little lock on it, so when people go to pay for business license or actually put their personal information in, they may not feel as comfortable and, with you being a city entity, I recommend that as well.”
The service could also include a monthly maintenance agreement.
“I recommend that we host your website,” Bonnett said. “And that we take care of the management of the website. I have quoted you $69 a month for about an hour a month of content management. That includes housing the website on my server, regular back ups in case your website gets hacked or anything, we can get it back up and running…as well as whenever you have content changes like meetings, upcoming agendas, things like that, you just email me what you want and we take care of managing the content.”
Bonnett also suggested that the city add a blog to the new website; adding a blog adds no further cost.
The council will consider the matter and make a decision at a later time.
The city council passed an amendment to the city’s business license ordinance. The way that the ordinance was previously written, only general contractors were required to get a business license. The amendment changed that by requiring all contractors, and subcontractors, to get a business license. The amendment passed three-to-two, with Mayor Betty Bradley, Councilman Gordon Massey and Councilwoman Ann Brown in favor, and Councilman Ronnie Bowman and Councilwoman Ann Cowan voting no. Councilman Anthony Alldredge was not at the meeting.
In other news, the council heard from the teen council representative Katie Whitfield who had a new mission statement for the group.
“The mission of the Argo Teen Council,” Whitfield said, “is to assist the city council in making decisions that affect the youth in our community, provide our city’s youth with knowledge about how the government operates and encourage the youth in our community to make a difference.”
The next Argo City Council meeting will be on Feb. 25.