Spring City Council Member Clears Up Website Confusion

Thanks to council member and webmaster Eugene Sweeney Spring City Borough boasts an impressive website, complete with current announcements, links to the municipality’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages, and an up-to-date Google Calendar, complete with all borough meetings.

To search “Spring City Borough PA” online, though, it would take some time for a resident to find the information.

“The ‘web-surfing public’ can be confused when searching for the site. Not only does springcitypa.gov show up but so do springcityboro.org and springcitypa.net,” said Sweeney.

“Springcitypa.net was created by a former resident and is no longer updated,” Sweeney said.

Springcitypa.net appears to have been last updated in 2009, and is listed as a “Spring City Community Website,” and includes articles such as an Animal Defecation Ordinance and a Spring City Library Challenge.

An old-fashioned looking site, the top of the page features a “then and now” photos as the user’s mouse hovers over the photo.

Springcityboro.org was once the official Spring City website and is now run by councilman James Burns. The site is more updated than springcitypa.net, but the most recent news update is from Sept. 29 and there is an empty events calendar.

The site does include some archived information from the borough, including a large list of ordinances zoning and land development information, uploaded as PDFs.

The now-official website launched in the summer of 2012 after Sweeney worked on the design for several months, at no charge to the borough.

“The only fee the borough has to pay is to the federal government for the .gov domain,” Sweeney said.

The website is also used as a class project for Sweeney’s class at Kutztown Middle School.

“Students are given the real world experience of maintaining and editing a ‘live’ website,” Sweeney said.