The new website is reminiscent of a previous version for the sake of familiarity and to cut costs, new Chief Appraiser Joe Don Bobbitt said.
“We’re kind of going back to that, a lot of that is it makes it quicker for us to implement, going back to an older version compared to a complete redesign. It also saves us a lot of money because we already had a version that people liked,” Bobbitt said.
The website was designed by a consulting and software firm, Improving, and the appraisal district. The new one provides a sleek, more modern look, trading in many of the drop-down menus for longer pages with more scrolling and information provided below.
Alan Blaylock, a Fort Worth city councilmember and newcomer to the appraisal district board, said that the cosmetics of the website are improved but that many changes to the back end are important as well. Blaylock said data is now backed up to a cloud server instead of the district’s servers.
“This is going to be a cloud-based solution now. So it is more secure. It will be more scalable as we move forward,” Blaylock said last week. “And those are really important. We don’t want the issues that we saw in the past where the website crashed because it couldn’t handle the load.”
The website allows the owners of the county’s nearly 680,000 residential and commercial properties to view their values and protest their values online. Last year, a new website was overwhelmed when it launched. Property owners were unable to access their TAD accounts, the website timed out and the protest function was missing for weeks, forcing the district to extend the deadline for protests.
Blaylock, who has an extensive background in computer science, said the trial run will help determine whether it can handle the volume of usage necessary during protest season.
“Before I as a board member say, 'pull the trigger and go live,' I want to know that we have properly addressed load and we know it will handle the demand that’s going to be placed on it,” Blaylock said.
Security is at the forefront of Blaylock’s and Bobbitt’s minds after a cyber attack in October 2022 exposed taxpayer data, though none of it was compromised, according to reports.
“We want to make sure that security isn’t an issue. That’s kind of the whole main goal, is to make sure that it’s stronger, more secure,” Bobbitt said. “The struggles we faced last year directly influenced our new direction.”
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