Here’s a question I asked myself while rebuilding the website for the Town of Ranlo: if a resident wants to know what happened at last Tuesday’s board meeting, what do they actually have to do?
On most small town websites, the answer goes something like this. Wait a month or two for the minutes to be approved. Find the right page. Download a PDF. Read through formal language that was written for the record, not for a busy parent or a retiree on their phone. Or, if the meeting was recorded, sit through two or three hours of video hoping to land on the part you care about.
Most people won’t do that. Not because they don’t care, but because life is busy. And when the only way to follow local government is to show up in person on a weeknight or dig through paperwork, a lot of folks get left out of the conversation without anybody meaning for it to happen.
So when we built the new townofranlo.org, we set out to fix that.
What we built for Ranlo
Every Board of Commissioners meeting now gets its own meeting record page, and each one brings everything together in one place:
- The full meeting video, pulled in from the Town’s YouTube channel and playable right on the page.
- A plain-English summary of what was discussed and decided, written in everyday language instead of legal shorthand.
- Clickable timestamps beside each topic. See a line about the street repaving vote? Click the time next to it and the video jumps straight to that moment. No scrubbing, no guessing.
- The agenda and the official approved minutes, attached to the same record once they’re available, so the summary and the official record live side by side.
And here’s the part that made the biggest difference: each meeting summary is also published as a news post on the Town’s website. That means it shows up on the homepage, in the News section, in Google search results, and on the Town’s Facebook page automatically. Residents don’t have to go looking for meeting information. It comes to them, in the places they already check.
Let me give you a real example. At a recent special meeting, the Ranlo board handled a lot of business: a decision on the future of the Community Building, a lease for the ballpark concession stand, street resurfacing and stormwater repair bids, speed bumps for a neighborhood street, and the start of a long-term strategic plan. In the old days, a resident who heard a rumor about “something with the Community Building” would have to wait for minutes or call Town Hall. Now they can open the news post on their phone, read a few sentences about what the board decided and why, and tap a timestamp to hear the discussion for themselves, straight from the people they elected.
Why this matters for residents
I’ve built websites for almost 30 years, and I’ll tell you plainly: this is one of the most useful things I’ve ever put on a town website. Here’s why.
It respects people’s time. A three-hour meeting becomes a five-minute read. Folks who want the details can still watch every minute, but nobody is forced to.
It works for people who can’t make it to meetings. Shift workers, parents with kids at practice, folks without reliable transportation, people with health issues. All of them deserve to know what their town is doing. Recorded video plus a readable summary means showing up in person isn’t the only way to stay informed.
It puts the facts in front of the rumor mill. In a small town, news travels fast, and it isn’t always accurate. When residents can see the actual discussion and the actual vote within days, a lot of misunderstandings never get started. When someone asks on Facebook “what happened with the concession stand?”, there’s now a link with the answer.
It builds trust. Transparency isn’t just a buzzword. When people can easily see how decisions get made, and hear the reasoning in their elected officials’ own words, they’re more likely to trust the process, even when they disagree with the outcome.
It makes town business searchable. Because every summary is a real page on the website, it shows up in Google. Someone searching “Ranlo water line project” or “Ranlo Community Building” finds the board’s actual discussion, not a three-year-old Facebook comment.
It’s accessible. The summaries are written in plain language, the site meets modern accessibility standards, and every page on the Ranlo site has a built-in “Listen” button that reads the content aloud for residents with low vision or reading difficulties.
It’s easy on staff. Small towns don’t have communications departments. The meeting records system is built so that adding a new meeting is a simple form, not a web project. And because the summary feeds the news section and Facebook automatically, staff aren’t writing the same update three times.
More than meeting records
Meeting records were a big piece of the Ranlo project, but they weren’t the only thing we built to make the Town easier to reach. A few of my favorites:
- Project Tracker. Every major town project, from water line upgrades to the new Town Hall, has its own page showing its current status, milestones and latest update. Residents can see exactly where their tax dollars are going and how far along things are.
- “I Want To…” menu. The things people come to a town website to do most, like paying a utility bill, applying for a permit, finding a form or signing up for text alerts, are one tap away from every page, on desktop and phone.
- One searchable document library. Forms, budgets, maps and reports live in a single library that can be filtered by department and document type, so nobody has to remember which page a PDF was hiding on.
- Department and committee pages that lead with tasks. Each one shows contacts, quick links, related news and documents first, then the background information.
- Staff directory with a personal touch. Including a small birthday banner that celebrates staff and board members on their special day. That one was a commissioner’s idea, and it’s a good reminder that a town website can have some heart.
- A history page that tells Ranlo’s story from mill village to incorporated town.
- Plain-English website reports. Every other week, town leadership gets a short, readable report on how residents are using the site and what they’re searching for. No confusing dashboards.
We’re bringing this same approach to Bessemer City, whose new website is in progress right now. The new Bessemer City site already includes a filterable events portal, a project tracker for the City’s development projects, a unified forms and documents library, task-first department and board pages, permanent pages for the City’s annual events so they don’t have to be rebuilt every year, and a City News section with dedicated spots for alerts and announcements. Each town is different, so we tailor what we build to how that community actually works, but the goal is always the same: make it easy for every resident to find what they need and stay informed.
The part nobody wants to talk about: cost
If you’ve ever sat in on a town’s website discussion, you know the big names in this space. Companies like CivicPlus, Granicus and Revize build websites for thousands of local governments. They do solid work, and for a large city with a big IT budget, they can make sense.
But look at what smaller towns have actually been quoted, according to their own public meeting packets and local news coverage:
- One Georgia city was offered a CivicPlus website at about $4,664 a year, plus setup, while a Granicus proposal for the same city carried a $27,000 one-time implementation fee.
- A small Maryland town weighed a three-year CivicPlus agreement at about $6,006 a year.
- A Michigan city received a Granicus quote of nearly $14,600 for the first year and about $6,700 for the second, for the website alone.
And here’s the catch: in many cases, that’s just the website. Agenda management, meeting video, citizen alerts and other features are often sold as separate products with their own yearly subscriptions. Add a few of those together and a small town can easily be looking at tens of thousands of dollars over a few years, for a template that looks a lot like every other town’s site.
Our municipal clients are getting this kind of functionality, and a website that is built around their community instead of a one-size-fits-all template, at a fraction of that cost. They also get something the big companies can’t really offer: a local designer who answers the phone, knows the area, and treats their website like it matters.
Your residents are already online. Is your town?
People expect to find information on their phones, quickly, in plain language. A town website that meets them there isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s how a modern local government stays connected with the people it serves.
If you’re on a town council, a town manager, a clerk or a county leader in the Carolinas and you’d like to see what this could look like for your community, I’d love to talk. You can see the Ranlo site in action at townofranlo.org, and reach out here for a no-pressure conversation.
Small town budget. Big city results. That’s what we do.