BROADALBIN — A college upperclassman for less than a grand reimagined Broadalbin’s town website. And she will continue to manage this latest iteration.
A college upperclassman for less than a grand reimagined Broadalbin’s town website. And she will continue to manage this latest iteration.
Siena College senior Alexis Smith is responsible for the design and maintenance of townofbroadalbinny.org, which launched Tuesday.
“I was kind of impressed,” said Broadalbin Town Supervisor Joseph DiGiacomo, who is also the 20-year-old student’s uncle.
The website took a month and a half to create. Smith, a computer science major, is still making improvements on the mobile interface.
At a $599 price tag — $1 below the federal tax form threshold — Smith is expected to at least serve as webmaster for the remainder of the year, while eventually working full time after graduation at her next job with Deloitte Innovative Technology.
“Don’t want to have to W-2 her or 10-99 her,” DiGiacomo said about the payment amount and laughed.
The website is intended to be the successor to townofbroadalbinny.com, which officials struggled to access following the death of longtime webmaster Peter Galarneau in early November. He was 70 years old.
More than half of all websites in Fulton County were designed, operated and maintained by the county’s former real property tax services director. Brian McIntosh of Caroga-based Canada Lake Computers was eventually able to help several towns keep their websites and connected email accounts functional.
Stratford has already got a new website up and running. Oppenheim and Perth are in the process of looking to get a new website.
Broadalbin Town Supervisor Joseph DiGiacomo at a meeting, Wednesday, April 9, 2024.
“Johnstown uses the same company that we’re looking at, but there’s nothing definite yet,” said Perth Councilman Armstead Barker, about North Shore Solutions. “We are in the process of it, though.”
Smith, whose services are exempt from competitive bidding per state general municipal law due to the pricing and category of work, said that she was initially approached by her uncle to work on the website.
The Great Sacandaga Lake community native graduated eighth in her class at Broadalbin-Perth High School in 2021 with scholarships from Rochester Institute of Technology and Siena.
Since her start at the Loudonville college, Smith has become versed in CMS, Java, Python and HTML coding. She has also served as chapter president of ACM-W (Assocation for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing).
“I've taken everything that I've learned over the past years and combined it to make a nice and functional website for the town,” Smith said.
The top of the home screen consists of a carousel and an introduction by DiGiacomo to “set the tone for the rest of the website.” Included is a digital calendar and navigation bar, bearing a similar theme to Fulton County’s website.
The Town Board meeting minutes stretch from 2021 to February — making up for the months and months of documents missing from townofbroadalbin.com late last year and early this year.
“I love web design,” Smith said. “And that's kind of the aspect that I like working on within computer science, so it's something that I definitely plan to continue.”
Townofbroadalbinny.com is still live, meanwhile. DiGiacomo is pushing to get the old domain name on the new website.
“It doesn't matter which one you have to punch in to redirect it, but you have to own it to redirect it,” DiGiacomo said.