Design study · Town government · Vermont
Open-meeting transparency as the front door
A redesign concept for a town of 2,457 that treats a statutory obligation — posting meeting recordings with the minutes — as the organizing idea rather than a compliance footnote.
Concept only, responding to a Website Development & Hosting RFP. Facts come from the town's published record; this is not the official Town of Arlington website.
- Town website design
- WordPress
- Open Meeting Law
- Ask surface
- Officials directory
- Document archive
Town of Arlington, VT — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Vermont's Act 51 requires recordings to be posted alongside minutes, and most small towns satisfy that with a folder of files. For a town this size the archive is genuinely substantial — roughly 1,125 agendas, minutes, and recordings — and a folder makes it useless: a resident who wants to know what the select board decided about a road has no way to find it, so transparency is met in letter and defeated in practice.
The approach
The meeting record becomes a living, searchable surface and the front door of the site, which for a town whose governance is its main public activity is the honest information architecture. An answer-first Ask Arlington runs over the real corpus with friendly source cards, so a plain question returns a specific meeting rather than a folder. Alongside it, a task-first front desk covers taxes, water, permits, and records, plus the real officials directory and the Town Report archive. The identity comes from the town's own covered bridge, in a Battenkill spruce and Vermont marble world.
The result
Nine routes as a WordPress-faithful build over roughly 1,125 real agendas, minutes, and recordings, with search, an answer surface, an officials directory, and the Town Report archive.
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