Design study · City government · Illinois
City services for a small town on a big lake
A city website concept built on the premise that a town this size does not need navigation so much as one box that finds everything.
Concept only. Not an official City of Carlyle website.
- Municipal website design
- Unified search
- Bill payment
- Permits
- Shelter reservations
City of Carlyle — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A small city's website has perhaps a dozen genuinely useful destinations, and traditional municipal navigation spreads them across a menu structure borrowed from cities ten times the size. The result is a site where finding the shelter reservation form takes four clicks through headings that exist only because the template had them.
The approach
One search box handles the whole site — pay a bill, pull a permit, find a council agenda, book a shelter — which suits a city where the total content is small enough that search genuinely can be the primary interface rather than a fallback. The lake, which is the reason most people know the town, carries the visual identity.
The result
Nine routes covering payments, permits, council agendas, and shelter reservations, unified behind a single search box.
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