New website improves staff efficiency, navigation for Belmont residents

BELMONT — The town has a new website as of this month, and residents and employees alike will see improved search functionality, ease of use and enhancements to information-sharing.

The new website can be found at belmontnh.gov. The old site is no longer active.

Civally "developed a website for us that is mobile-device friendly, so you can use it on your phone, you can use it on your tablet, and it’s going to be much easier to try to read and navigate than our old site,” said Colleen Akerman, assessing administrator and executive assistant for Belmont. “The new site is fully [Americans with Disabilities Act]-compliant, so the highest requirements that the government has for being compliant for ADA for anyone using the website are all met with the new website.”

The town’s former website host went out of business on Oct. 1, but the shift allowed town leaders to better secure the site by switching to a .gov domain. Town staff have enjoyed working with the website developer, Civally, which specializes in websites for small towns and villages.

“The new website company said that they were super excited to work on our website, because they are doing things they haven’t done before,” Akerman said. “They were awfully happy to work on our site. They’ve been extremely responsive.”

One of the improvements with the town’s new site is its search functionality. In a search bar on the upper right side of the page, residents can search for anything Belmont-related, instead of going to Google. In fact, it’s recommended to avoid using Google at all to search for Belmont town information.

“Please go to our website instead of just trying to Google results for things, so you don’t end up on the old website ... or broken links that don’t work anymore, because that’s not .org,” Akerman said.

When the town became aware it needed to switch to a new web host, staff had one year to set goals for the new site and research options.

“Some of our main goals were to be fully ADA-compliant and mobile-device friendly, user-friendly for staff to complete updates and security functions for individual users, and to find a company that offered affordability, and strong customer service to support us in the transition,” Akerman wrote in an email to The Laconia Daily Sun.

This has been one slight kink in the transition, though. A large number of old links, including the old website domain, no longer work, although they still appear in search engine results. The website host company is working on wrangling those.

“We are working on processes to redirect or shutdown all of those links, but unfortunately, it’s algorithms that Google has that they use,” she said.

In the town’s October newsletter, available at belmontnh.gov/public_notices/october-2025-newsletter, some specific troubleshooting instructions were provided, including clearing browser caches, loading the site in a new private window and trying a different browser.

For town employees and department heads, making changes to the website just got a whole lot easier. Timely notices and announcements can now be scheduled ahead of time and for a set duration, making it easier to alert the public to upcoming meetings and events, or office closures and staff changes.

“Some of the things they do, the behind-the-scenes things, that’s gonna make us more efficient; one of those things is that there are security functions so that we can allow multiple employees to access their own sections of the website to be able to do their updates, instead of me doing all the updates for every department,” Akerman said.

The cost of implementing the new website was not immediately available.

To check out the town's new website, visit belmontnh.gov. The selectboard will meet next at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at Belmont Mill.

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Katlyn Proctor can be reached at katlyn@laconiadailysun.com or by calling 603-524-0150.