SCARBOROUGH – Scarborough is getting a new address on the information superhighway, and a fresh new look to go along with it.

After nearly seven months of design and development, the new municipal website will go live on Monday, Feb. 10, at the web address www.scarboroughmaine.org, replacing the current site, now nearly a decade old.

“It’s going to be a totally new view – cleaner, simpler, sexier,” said Town Manager Tom Hall, on Wednesday.

“Our current website is content-rich, but very confusing,” said Hall. “I’ve always been impressed by the amount of information we serve up, but it is kind of confusing to sift through it all. The new site is going to be much easier to navigate such that, if you have kind of an idea what you’re looking for, you should be able to get to it within a couple of clicks.”

“The new site will feature better navigation, less repetition and clutter, updated material and a more modern design,” said Jennifer Nitchman, Scarborough’s director of information technology services in a Jan. 28 release announcing the website’s launch date.

The new site will provide users with “a clean, clear structure and search functionality to assist the community with finding the information they need,” said Nitchman. “One-click options on the site banner allow citizens to quickly locate commonly requested actions, such as registering a car, applying for a permit, or viewing maps.”

Eventually, city councilors and employees will get email addresses using the new @scarboroughmaine.org extension. However, for now, emails will remain unchanged, using, in the example of Hall, the old format of thall@ci.scarborough.me.us.

“In a perfect world everything would have switched at the same time,” said Hall. “But we wanted to get the website up and running and make sure it was free of bugs before tackling that next step, given that some of us, frankly, have several hundred email contacts that will necessarily want to be notified of the change.”

According to Nitchman, the new homepage, which mimics the look of the directional signs erected throughout town in 2012, “will prominently display the latest municipal news, including alerts, bulletins, Town Council information and a calendar of town events.” A notice will be posted to the homepage when email addresses for town officials are changed, said Hall.

Work on the new website began last July when teams representing each town department began to contribute ideas for content, functionality and design. The site was built by Scarborough’s new web coordinator, Sean Bushway, hired last fall, Hall said, on the strength of his web development experience. Because it was created in-house, the new website comes “at no additional cost to the town,” said Hall.

Built on a Google “cloud-based” platform, the new site is designed for decentralized administration. It will allow representatives from each town department to log in any time, from anywhere, to refresh their respective pages, keeping content fresh and updated as opposed to the current site, which funnels all changes though a few key personnel.

“We opted to build through Google because it’s an extremely low cost solution for site hosting, and we can take advantage of a wealth of existing Google apps, including calendars, slideshows, videos, and

surveys,” said Bushway.

Hall said he is particularly excited about the new website’s survey function, which he said would evolve over the coming months.

“That will allow us to reach out and take the pulse of the community on the hot issues of the day, to test the appetite for certain things and, of course, to report out those results,” he said.

After transitioning email address, the next big step for the town’s IT department will be to turn their attention to the school department’s Internet presence.

“By next year, we plan to expand the new design to the school district site and leverage Google’s ‘Apps for Education,’ which will enable secure, collaborative, cloud-based learning and education tools for students, staff, administration and the public,” said Nitchman.

“We are confident that this new site will be a welcomed change and our citizens will be happy with the new design, layout and functions,” said Hall, “but this is by no means a completed project. The site will always be evolving and growing to meet the needs of the town. We look forward to adding more features and functionality in the future.”

The new home page for the town of Scarborough’s website, is scheduled to debut on Monday, Feb. 10. The new address is www.scarboroughmaine.org.