Photo by Catherine Stachowiak
The Kern River Valley Cemetery District (KRVCD) is planning to improve its website, fulfilling one of the Kern County Grand Jury’s recommendations in its last investigation of the district, which suggested the district’s site is not transparent enough, lacking contact information on trustees.
This topic was under New Business, on the agenda for the monthly board of trustees meeting, Tuesday August 13 when William Box, who previously helped the historical society with some computer and email issues, advised the district.
Chairman of the board of trustees for KRVCD Harry Schutstz introduced Box saying, “I invited him here today just to talk a little bit about our website, and also to talk about the Google platform, specifically emails.”
Will introduced the board to Google Workspace saying, “They have a whole suite of business Microsoft Word equivalent applications. They have a Document, Word kind of program. They have an Excel type of program; they have a power point presentation type of program. They also have storage, which they call Google Drive.”
Box told the trustees that he believed for some businesses and some organizations, having a central location to store files and share documents, and maybe have some user based emails, that have a professional email sounds a lot better than personal email addresses. He said, “Gmail is the big leading product that Google offers. It’s a very secure and reliable way of doing email.”
Box said that he thought that a custom email with a domain, which can be linked to the website, would provide a professional identity and give some confidence.
He suggested that role based email works better if the entity changes to a new person in that position, then the email can remain under that role or title, rather than having to get a new email address with the person’s name. This would also assure a record of previous emails continues to be available. He also thought being able to access one’s email from one’s outside devices would be convenient.
Box supposed the program would coordinate with all of Google’s advantages such as a calendar, video conferencing, and then Google Drive storage opportunity.
“Even if you didn’t use Google I would suggest obtaining a domain name of some sort that you can use,” he said. Box believed Google lets nonprofits have the program for free but didn’t know whether they’d do that for a government entity.
Regarding the district’s website, Box said he’d recommend getting a domain, which links to the website, making it easier to find. Box said most people used the current host Streamline for their websites. He didn’t have any critique for the district’s current website.
Box said Streamline has 3 different levels. He suggested that the third level would offer more for KRVCD manager, Orion Sanders to improve the face of the website and could be a marketing investment.
Sanders wanted to investigate more into the costs involved. Box said Schutstz invited him because they worked on the Google product for something else and that he (Box) is not marketing for Google.
