Schuylkill County’s Government Website is So Old …

At today’s Schuylkill County Commissioners meeting, the fellas will likely approve a contract with a company to rebuild the county’s website.

According to this week’s meeting agenda, the Commissioners will consider a $23,845 contract with Revize Software Systems, of Troy, MI, to redesign the county’s ancient website. The proposed deal includes planning, analysis, “discovery and design”, template development, testing, site map development, content editing, site administration training, site hosting, and tech support.

That’s probably not a terrible deal. Revize has been in business since 1995, so they’ll be pretty familiar with the look and feel of our county site. It’ll be a good throwback for the team that gets assigned to rebuilding our site.

Ya see, the county’s website is really old. The way it looks right now …

… is not too much different from the way it looked when it was first built …

IN THE 20TH CENTURY!

Based on our recent trip in the Internet Wayback Machine, the earliest recorded snapshot of the Schuylkill County website was October 1999.

At least it was Y2K compliant. Maybe the county was thinking this internet craze would fade away. Who knows? But the site as it sits right now, is old, hard to navigate, and looks like it was built on GeoCities and optimized for the Netscape browser.

And now that we really need a clean, informative, and useful site, what we’ve got is the equivalent of a storage garage with about 22 years of memories packed into it.

Yeah, the Schuylkill County website is so old.

This is where you say, “How old is it?”

Glad you asked.

It’s so old …

It thinks it can get 3 teas for $1.

Hey, that’s pretty old. Do you know some stores are trying to get up to $1.29 for a pint of Guers these days?

That’s not the only way we know the county’s website is old.

This site is so old …

We caught it smoking in the Cressona Mall.

We’re actually not sure when the Cressona Mall banned smoking but it was the last of the 3 in Schuylkill County to do so.

Trivia: Schuylkill Mall was actually the first to ban smoking indoors, way back in September 1994, just 5 years before the county’s website was launched.

But damn, that’s old, right?

It’s so old …

It’s going to be in Cruise Night.

Boy, in 1999, Cruise Night in Pottsville was quite the spectacle. The early days of that event were pretty much unmatched for local entertainment.

It’s strange that as collecting and restoring vintage cars got more popular, Cruise Night seemed to have lost its energy. If that had been let alone from its early days, Cruise Night probably would be a super big deal by now.

It owes $10 in late fees at Hollywood Video.

Yeah, in 1999, when we believe the county website launched, the main form of home entertainment was still VHS tapes.

And if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go rent it at one of the many video stores in Schuylkill County. Every town pretty much had its own video store or stores.

It wouldn’t be too long before people around here switched to DVDs but in ’99, people either rented tapes or they were sitting on a massive collection of VHS that would soon be totally worthless.

But back to that county website. It’s so old …

It goes offline when someone needs to use the phone.

Yeah, a lot of people may not remember when the internet was in its infancy. You connected with a regular phone line. And if someone needed to use the phone in the house, you had to go offline.

Well, the county website remembers. It was probably built by someone using a 56Kbps dial-up connection.

We assume the builders of the new site will be using a much faster connection and likely will have a more modern theme. That’s the company’s specialty, municipal websites, and that’s a good thing because our municipal website is so old …

You’re going to Happy Hour with it at The Brass Tap on Friday.

Remember when people used to be out the door it was so busy downtown on a Friday evening? It wasn’t just The Tap, either. Missing those days. And mind you, that’s when people said Pottsville’s best days were 30, 40, even 50 years behind it.

Yeah, our county website is really old.