After almost three months of being offline, the Town of New Paltz’s website is back up and running. Town officials pulled the proverbial off switch on the old site in late April after discovering that www.townofnewpaltz.org had been targeted by hackers in Brazil and Turkey.
“It’s still very much a work in progress,” explained Supervisor Susan Zimet. “We decided it was better to have something go up now. We still think what we have now is better than what we had before.”
Zimet noted that not every department head had totally filled out their part of the website or made all the corrections needed. For instance, some links when clicked go nowhere right now.
Back in 2012, a New York State Comptroller’s audit criticized the town’s IT setup, saying that it had the potential from unauthorized abuse by outside users. Since April, town officials have used the Town of New Paltz’s Facebook page to keep residents updated on when meetings would take place or to give announcements.
Town officials are excited about the new website because they’ll now have the ability to easily post meeting minutes and agendas. It also has automatic text enlargement to accommodate people with visual disabilities.
Our test of the new website showed that it worked with most browsers – but had some issues running on Google Chrome. If you’re having trouble getting online, try Firefox, Internet Explorer or Apple’s Safari.
Explore it for yourself at www.townofnewpaltz.org or https://newpaltzny.vt-s.net/.
UPDATE: If you’re a Chrome user having trouble logging into the town website, also try typing in https://newpaltzny.vt-s.net/ rather than the old address. That resolved the issue for us.
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