Town of Rothesay

The Town of Rothesay needed a new municipal website that could become a primary source of information for residents, businesses, visitors and other community stakeholders.

The existing approach needed to be replaced with a site that was easier to navigate for the public while also being straightforward for Town staff to maintain internally. Authorized staff needed to be able to publish notices, events and other frequently changing information quickly without depending on a developer for routine updates.

The volume and variety of municipal information also created an organizational challenge. Visitors needed a clearer way to identify where information relevant to them would be located rather than navigating a structure based primarily around the Town’s internal organization.

The website also needed to work consistently across desktop computers, tablets and phones and provide an accessible experience to as broad an audience as possible.

WordPress was selected as the content-management platform to give the Town a flexible system that staff could manage through a browser while still allowing the site to be extended as requirements changed.

The proposed information architecture organized the website around four principal audiences: Visitors, Business, Residents and Town Hall. This allowed people to begin with their reason for visiting the website and reach information through a structure that reflected their needs rather than the municipality’s internal departments.

A custom responsive design was developed specifically for Rothesay, with an emphasis on clear navigation, readability and compatibility across different screen sizes.

Events were also treated as an important part of the municipal information service. The calendar was designed to be easy for staff to maintain, with filtering for visitors and upcoming events surfaced on the homepage so people could quickly see what was happening in the community.

The project included content migration, search-engine optimization, accessibility and browser testing, staff training and a structured review and launch process rather than treating the work as a visual redesign alone.

A custom WordPress theme was created around the Town’s requirements rather than adapting an off-the-shelf commercial template.

The site incorporated municipal publishing workflows using WordPress user roles. Different levels of access could be assigned to administrators, editors, authors and contributors, including a workflow where content could be submitted for review before publication.

The project also incorporated an events calendar with filtering and automated handling of upcoming events, together with social-media integration and newsletter subscription functionality.

Accessibility, functional behaviour and performance were tested as part of development, including cross-browser and mobile testing, WCAG accessibility testing and page-speed analysis.

The project gave the Town a modern WordPress-based municipal website with a structure centred on the needs of residents, businesses, visitors and people interacting with Town Hall.

Town staff were provided with the tools and training to manage routine content internally, including notices, events and other frequently changing information. On-site training and supporting documentation were included so staff could use both WordPress and the publishing workflow without requiring specialist technical knowledge.

The responsive design also provided a consistent way to access municipal information across desktop, tablet and mobile devices, while the reorganized information architecture and event functionality made important community information more prominent and easier to maintain.

The result was a more flexible municipal web presence built around long-term internal management rather than dependence on a proprietary website platform.