The Town of Ranlo, NC just launched a brand new website — and David Turner Designs built it from the ground up.
If you’ve ever tried to find a meeting agenda, check on a road project, or figure out who to call at your local town hall, you know how frustrating a stuck-in-2005 municipal website can be. Ranlo’s old site was exactly that problem: static pages, scattered PDFs, no real way for residents to see what their town government was actually doing.
We didn’t just give it a fresh coat of paint. We rebuilt it as a true informational hub:
- A navigation built around what residents actually need — a 2-click rule, so nobody’s hunting five pages deep for a phone number or a form
- Departments, staff, and committees, all organized and searchable — 8 departments, 13 staff members, and 4 committees, each with its own volunteer sign-up routed straight to the right inbox
- Live project tracking — residents can watch real progress on things like the South Ranlo waterline project, not just read a stale PDF update from six months ago
- Built-in text-to-speech — meeting summaries, news, and site content can be listened to, not just read, right out of the box
- A real events calendar — Miltown Nights, the Health Fair, Food Truck Fridays, the Fall Festival — all in one place
- A full meeting and minutes archive — 95+ records, organized and easy to find
- Nearly 100 town documents, pulled out of a scattered legacy system and into one searchable hub
Here’s the part I’m proudest of: we built this ADA and WCAG 2.1 compliant from day one — not bolted on after the fact once someone complained. With federal ADA Title II requirements bearing down on local governments (compliance deadline: April 2027), most towns are going to be scrambling to patch old sites at the last minute. Ranlo didn’t wait. That’s the difference between doing it right and doing it because you have to.
This is exactly the kind of project I love taking on — a small town that wanted more for its residents, and the follow-through to make it happen the right way, not the fast way.
If you’re a municipal leader anywhere in the Carolinas looking at an outdated town website — or an ADA compliance deadline you’d rather get ahead of than scramble for — let’s talk. This is what I do.
