Town, Small City, and Community websites serve to communicate essential information to both citizens and potential businesses and tourists.
However, even a well-designed community website won’t be of much use to visitors if it doesn’t include certain key elements.
By coordinating with professionals, you can ensure that your page provides actual value to the people of your town. You need experts to help you properly design and maintain the site. You also need the following major components:
Event Calendar
Citizens often visit their town websites to learn when everything from board meetings to local celebrations will be held. Having an up-to-date, easily accessible calendar on your town’s site ensures that anyone looking for this information can find it in seconds.
This is very important to remember if you serve in local government. When citizens can’t find what they’re looking for online, they may call your office instead. Fielding calls from multiple citizens throughout the day eats up a lot of your time. You can’t focus on important community tasks when you’re receiving calls every hour from people wanting to find out when the next board meeting will be held. With an online calendar, this won’t be a regular occurrence. Citizens can find the information they’re looking for, and you can spend more of your time serving the community.
News
The internet makes it easy for people to get the latest updates on local news. They no longer need to rely on a weekly paper to find out what’s going on in their communities.
News feeds promote a greater degree of civic participation and engagement among the citizenry. The people who live in your town should take an active interest in the community. This is difficult to do when they don’t have access to regular updates on local issues. Maintaining a news feed on your website will keep citizens informed, and keep them engaged.
Notifications
Along with a news feed, it also helps to include up-to-the-minute, time-sensitive notifications on your town website. This benefits the members of the community in several major ways.
For example, with notifications, you can alert citizens to emergency situations. Perhaps there was a dangerous accident on a local road, making it impassable. An online notification system allows you to easily tell the people of your town to avoid that road until it is clear.
Notifications also provide citizens with updated information about town events. Maybe harsh weather has forced the cancellation of a town meeting or local celebration. If citizens aren’t aware of this, they may try to attend, only finding out about the cancellation when they arrive.That’s unlikely to occur if they know they can visit your website for up-to-date alerts.
Notifications also help during power outages and similar situations. Residents can check the website to, for instance, find out when you expect power to be restored.
Event Registrations
There’s a good chance your town often hosts events that citizens must register to participate in. Relying on mail to collect registrations is cumbersome and time-consuming. On the other hand, if anyone who wants to participate in an event can register via your website, the process will be much more efficient.
This feature doesn’t merely serve residents within your community. It can also help attract more business from those who live in the overall region. For example, your town may hold annual events in which vendors are invited to promote their goods and/or services.
Business owners who live outside your community may not be inclined to register for these events if doing so involves visiting the town hall, picking up the appropriate forms, and mailing them back. They may simply be too busy to justify investing that kind of time.
When the registration form is available online, they’ll be more likely to participate. Outside vendors could attract visitors from neighboring towns during these events, helping to boost the local economy.
Website Editor
Your website shouldn’t just be easy for citizens to navigate. It should also be easy for you to update and edit. You can’t provide the people of your town with up-to-date notifications or relevant calendar changes if it takes a long time for you to make any adjustments to the site.
Thus, it’s useful to have a website editor you can access and operate at any time. This is yet another reason it helps to hire professional website designers for your small town or community league’s page. They can equip you with the tools you need to edit your website quickly and easily. They’ll also work with you to ensure all the features listed here are included on your site. As a result, both you and the citizens of your town will have an extremely valuable resource to access whenever you need it.
