County makes subtle yet important change to strengthen website
Published on October 11, 2022
The change is so subtle to the user, you probably didn’t even realize it happened. But in the early morning hours of October 5, 2022, the Weld County Government website shifted from the URL weldgov.com to weld.gov.
“The public can still type in weldgov.com,” said Weld County’s Chief Information Officer Ryan Rose, “as it will redirect the user to our more secure weld.gov site. It seems like a minor change to some, but it’s a change that makes our website more secure and provides visitors to our site the assurance that they are on a genuine government website.”
Perhaps equally as good of news to users of the website and members of the public who communicate with county employees over email – no change on the user-end is needed.
“This change to a .gov website and email is for security reasons, but we will continue to have the weldgov.com website address and email addresses usable. You will just end up at the weld.gov site,” said Rose.
Moving to a .gov site improves security and searchability of our online presence, ensures you are in fact on the official Weld County Government website (.coms can be purchased by anyone; .gov domains are limited to qualified government agencies), and it requires a secure HTTPS connection, among other security improvements.
So why didn’t we start with a .gov in the first place?
“It’s a good question,” said Rose. “Originally the .gov domain was expensive for governments to purchase and somewhat complicated to obtain. In 2021, there was a change in how .gov domains could be obtained as the program moved under the Federal Department of Homeland Security and the high fees were eliminated.
Over the years, as technology has improved and increased in our daily use, people looking to commit online fraud have become more sophisticated. Government at all levels understand the importance of keeping their systems and information safe, and this is just one more way Weld County is doing just that.”