Design study · Village government · Illinois
Built brick by brick since 1890
A village website concept whose most useful feature is the least glamorous one: a search that still works when you spell it wrong.
Concept only. Not an official Village of Gilberts website.
- Village website design
- Typo-proof search
- Events calendar
- Document archive
Village of Gilberts — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Municipal search is where small-village websites quietly fail. Residents search for ordinance numbers, street names, and department terms they half-remember, and exact-match search returns nothing — so people call the village hall instead, which is the outcome the website was supposed to prevent. Document archives compound it by being long lists of filenames.
The approach
Search is made typo-proof so a misspelled street name or a half-remembered term still finds the right page, which for a village this size does more for staff workload than any other single feature. A working calendar and real document archives back it up, so the things search finds are actually there and current.
The result
Routes covering village services, a working calendar, and document archives, with typo-tolerant search across the site.
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