City & Local Government Website Design
The City of Swartz Creek website was the first City & Local Government website I created. It was done years ago in Joomla, upgraded once, and will eventually be migrated to WordPress. The biggest challenge with this site was the large volume of content, which must be readily available to the public. Scalability, ease of navigation, and capability of performing site searches are essential.
Another challenge was the requirement for key city staff to be able to make simple edits or add content to the website when need be. I provided training to their administrative users for this purpose as well as phone and email support. While I do the more complex tasks, we both maintain the content of the website. It is one of few such agreements I have with a customer. I am happy to discuss the specific needs and requirements of your city or government agency’s website.
Plug-in’s, Modules, & Extensions
There are times when a customer’s website requires a certain feature or desires special cosmetics. Sometimes the requests are outside of the scope of the content management system. Although the City website currently uses Joomla, WordPress also has it’s out of the box limitations. This is where 3rd party Plug-ins, Modules, & Extensions can help.
There are developers around the world who create programs that add features and functionality to each CMS. The City has numerous official documents, reports, and information that must be available to the public, for several years. I used a 3rd party module to achieve this purpose. It greatly eases the administration of the files and makes it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
Another common feature is purely cosmetic. Almost every website I have created has a slide-show plug-in, such as the one on our home page. They add motion to an otherwise static page and reduce the space that would be necessary to display the pictures individually. It is likely that in time I will migrate the city’s website from Joomla to WordPress. But for now, it is meeting theirs and their citizens needs.