Design study · Village government · Illinois
A lakeside village that doesn't run you in circles
A village website concept where Spanish is a full parallel site rather than a translated subset, because a meaningful share of residents read in it.
Concept only. Not an official Village of Round Lake website.
- Village website design
- Bilingual search
- Full Spanish pages
- Live accessibility audit
Village of Round Lake — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Small-village sites treat Spanish as an add-on: a translated homepage, maybe a few key pages, and English everywhere the actual business happens. That is worse than it looks, because the pages that get left in English are usually the transactional ones — permits, payments, code — where misunderstanding has consequences. Search compounds it, since a Spanish-language query typically returns nothing.
The approach
Spanish runs as full pages rather than a partial layer, and search is bilingual so a query in either language finds the same material — which is the part most bilingual municipal sites skip and the part that determines whether the translation is usable. A live accessibility audit is published on the site rather than asserted in a proposal, keeping the claim checkable.
The result
Twenty-five routes with bilingual search, full Spanish pages, and a live accessibility audit.
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