THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 12, 1996 TAG: 9607110152
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 73 lines
The city's latest major construction project won't be stirring up a lot of dust or tying up any traffic - unless that traffic is the electronic impulses on the global computer connection known as the World Wide Web.
The Public Information Office has fired up a glitzy new Internet site, known as a ``home page,'' and is packing it with data of value to residents and anybody else who is thinking of visiting, doing business or moving here.
The Virginia Beach home page, which replaces the city's lower-tech electronic bulletin board, is up and running, but it is a work in progress: Lots of valuable information is available, but a lot more has yet to be loaded up and made available to computer users.
``It's a long process,'' said Pam Ford, citizen services coordinator with public information. ``It will be a work-in-progress forever. It will always be changing and evolving and it will never be the same today as it will be next week.''
One of the reasons is that the city has tried to build its web site as inexpensively as possible. Ford's office, with the help of a summer intern knowledgeable in computer design, has coordinated the work. Responsibility for providing and updating the computer information gradually will be farmed out to the individual city departments - an effort that will take a lot of time and training.
``We'll work on it all summer,'' Ford said. ``After that, each city department will be responsible for its own information. Most of the initial stuff you see now is more static information. We'll then proceed to work on job listings, calendars of events, the kinds of things that will have to be updated weekly or biweekly.''
A full-color photo of a family at the beach, with a computer-screen background of patterns in the sand, welcomes people to the home page. Its address, for the computer literate, is http://www.virginia-beach.va.us.
From there, point-and-click maneuvers take the user through a series of information groupings, such as city hall, news and events, community involvement, travel and tourism and so forth. Some of the groupings are not yet activated. One that will be particularly useful, when it is up and running, is a ``search engine'' that will allow users to type in a key word or phrase that will bring up the information they want immediately, without a lot of searching through directories.
In its present form, the web site acts like a glitzy phone directory, with short explanations of a lot of city services attached. A ``comprehensive services'' listing runs from ``abandoned autos'' and ``accident reports'' through the alphabet to ``zoning violations and enforcement.''
The information available varies widely, depending on the topic. If you try to find out the city's real estate tax rate, or how much a dog license costs, you might simply get a phone listing for the proper city office. If you're looking for the operating hours of the Knotts Island Ferry, you'll find a schedule.
Information that changes frequently - meeting schedules, job listings, job-contract postings - is the toughest for staff to handle. There is no listing, for example, of concert dates and ticket prices at the Virginia Beach Amphitheater, or for other cultural events.
``At this point,'' Ford said, ``many of the departments don't have the training, the software or even the hardware to deal with it.'' The web site's growth and usefulness will be an evolutionary process, she said.
Cost is a major factor.
``All this is being done by employees,'' Ford said ``No new people are being hired. We've got to look at how much resources, time, money and all that, that we are spending on providing information on the Internet when X percent of our citizens don't have access to it.
``We have to consider who are the haves and have-nots. Something like 6 percent of the community has Internet access . . . So we have to keep in mind that our job is to provide information where the most people can get to it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by JIM WALKER
The Virginia Beach home page, which replaces the city's lower-tech
electronic bulletin board, is up and running, but it is a work in
progress. by CNB