Welcome

Mayor Ken Pringle

Dear Visitor:

Welcome to the new Belmar.com, the official website of the Borough of Belmar.

We’ve given Belmar.com a whole new look and feel, which we hope will make your online visits to the Borough of Belmar easier, more enjoyable and much more informative. In addition to a more attractive new look, the site has an array of new features. The most important of these is the ability to quickly upload new information and photographs to our site, so we can keep our content fresh, and our residents and visitors better informed.

One of our objectives in redesigning Belmar.com is to build an active and informed online community for our residents. The new site includes online tools that will enable our residents to upload photos to our community gallery, to provide feedback to our posts, and to share information, opinions and ideas with one another. We’re hoping these tools will not only improve the level of service the Borough provides, but also help build a stronger community in the process. The new site is built on a Wordpress blog platform, which enables our site to incorporate the latest social networking tools. For example, visitors will be able to sign up to receive newsletter-style email updates on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that will include new posts in the categories of interest you select. Visitors can also subscribe to RSS feeds or Twitter broadcasts from the site. Residents who are Facebook members can link their Facebook accounts to their profiles on Belmar.com.

Like the earlier Belmar.com site, the development of the new Belmar.com has been an entirely volunteer effort, and there is still a great deal to do. Moving and reformatting content from the old Belmar.com site is a time-consuming process, and we ask for your patience while our volunteers continue to work on the site and add features and new capabilities and portals throughout the summer.

Speaking of volunteers, let me acknowledge them. First and foremost, I want to thank Brian Messenlehner, who single-handedly wrote all of the code that went into the original Belmar.com site, and in doing so gave Belmar one of the first municipal websites in New Jersey with a content management system (“CMS”). And while other municipalities have resorted to spending tens of thousands of dollars to develop websites based on proprietary software, Brian has been the guiding force in helping Belmar leap-frog past them, by building the new Belmar.com site on the open-source Wordpress platform. Wordpress is not only free, but it’s being improved every day by hundreds of software developers who are creating new capabilities, or “plug-ins,” to make Wordpress better. So, thanks to Brian Messenlehner, Belmar is out in front again with what will be one of the most cutting-edge — and far and away the most cost effective — municipal websites in the State. The Wordpress format will enable us to keep our content current and add new features on a regular basis. In addition, we will be using the capabilities of Wordpress MU (MU stands for multi-user) to create and maintain separate portals (think of portals as the web-equivalent of separate sections of the Sunday newspaper) for the Belmar Marina, the Beach, Residents, Special Events, etc., where we can provide more focused content and photos targeted to particular segments of the Belmar.com community. The same software will enable our many groups and organizations, from the Belmar Public Library to the Belmar Historical Society to easily create and maintain their own sites within the Belmar.com online community, and provide a steady stream of updated content for their members and the public.

In addition to Brian Messenlehner, special thanks also go to my son-in-law, Brian Callahan of HeliumDesign.com, who regularly pitches in long distance from his home in Melrose, MA to help us when we hit a snag, or need an extra set of hands. He’s been especially valuable in helping us incorporate more videos into our posts, which opens a whole new range of possibilities for communicating with residents and vistors, alike. I also want to thank Borough resident Michele Lomas, who has been generous with her insights and considerable web development skills. A special artistic credit goes to Maggie McChesney of Squan Custom Framing, whose photograph, “Morning at Belmar,” we adapted to be the first home-page banner of the site. Click here to see the original photograph, which is one of my favorite Belmar photos. Last but not least, I want to thank the front office staff at Borough Hall, in particular Borough Administrator Robbin Kirk, Borough Clerk April Claudio, Belmar Tourism Commission assistant Mary Brabazon, who regularly give time and support above and beyond the call of duty to our efforts to keep Belmar residents and visitors better informed.

Kind regards,

Kenneth E. Pringle
Mayor of Belmar

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