We’re excited to launch a brand new website for the Town of Richmond, Vermont!
Ecopixel collaborated with the town’s web committee on a website with features that make editing easy for staff, and finding information easy for residents. The new design is mobile-friendly and responsive, which means it looks great on all screen sizes. It conforms to ADA web accessibility guidelines.
The website has a fresh, colorful design that reflects Richmond’s natural surroundings. Richmond, Vermont has a population of about 4,200 and is located along the Winooski River in Vermont’s Green Mountains.
Ecopixel designed “dashboards” for each of the town’s boards, committees, and departments. Residents can easily:
explore town services, ordinances and projects
get contact information for committee members and staff, and
find details and documents for recent and upcoming municipal meetings.
The town’s staff can also add this information in a streamlined process. Ecopixel’s new meeting management system keeps hundreds of meeting documents per month grouped together by meeting.
It’s easy for website editors to drag-and-drop minutes, agendas, and packets/reading files into the website backend. Once the minutes are approved, website editors can set the approval date and it shows as approved in the frontend. Meetings automatically appear in the municipal calendar and meeting archives. Staff can tag meetings with categories to cross-reference major projects or ongoing topics.
The old WordPress website had security problems, and was difficult to navigate because it wasn't designed to handle the needs of a town website. Over the years, pages were added to provide ad hoc navigation, requiring several clicks to get through to specific meeting documents. All the links on the old site had been made by hand because there was no automatic navigation or archiving.
A new town website is more than just its design — historical information is important, as well. Ecopixel migrated and reorganized 7,000 documents and hundreds of pages from the old site. Ecopixel created a new site content structure to make it easier for residents and visitors to find things.
Ecopixel developed and tested the site’s design to foster inclusion and follow ADA guidance by conforming to WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards. This is the current government standard for ensuring visitors with disabilities do not run into barriers when using the website.
Other important features of the new town website include:
a built-in news bulletin system so that notices can be posted on the home page, and archived when appropriate
a town contacts list makes it easy to keep a centralized list of all department contacts, while also showing them on each department's dashboard page
an integrated search engine searches the site’s many documents and pages
the robust and secure TYPO3 content management system; it's great for municipal websites and even powers the Quebec, Canada provincial government website serving 8 million residents
editing access that's restricted by department, so editors can only work with the pages, news, and meetings that they're responsible for (makes editing simpler and the site more secure)
Ecopixel will continue making progressive improvements to the site as part of its ongoing proactive maintenance, reliable hosting, and prompt support.
Richmond suffered for years with a website that was hard to navigate and difficult to maintain. We are thrilled to bring this small Vermont town up to date with this state-of-the-art, beautiful website!