Design study · City government · Washington
A city site that computes its own week
A new-website concept for a rail town of 11,000 where the homepage is an almanac — and the meeting dates on it are calculated rather than typed.
Concept only, responding to an RFQ for a new accessible city website. Facts come from the City's published site; this is not the official City of Sumner website.
- Municipal website design
- WordPress theme
- Computed meeting dates
- Search or Ask
- Seasonal content
- Accessibility
City of Sumner — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Small-city websites go stale in a specific, predictable place: the calendar. A clerk types meeting dates into a page, the schedule shifts, and within two months the site is quietly wrong about when the council meets — which is the single fact residents most rely on it for. Small staff and an annual cycle of real recurring events make the maintenance burden permanent rather than occasional.
The approach
The homepage is a civic almanac. Resident tasks sit at the fold, then a week ledger whose meeting dates are computed live from the City's own published cadence rather than hand-entered, so the most staleness-prone content on a municipal site maintains itself. A seasonal postcard band is keyed to the city's real recurring calendar — Rhubarb Days, the Daffodil Festival's Sumner parade leg — which lets the site feel current year-round without anyone rewriting it. A masthead Search-or-Ask omnibox answers plain questions from the City's pages and hosted documents.
The result
Sixteen routes on a real WordPress theme, with a self-computing meeting ledger, a seasonal band tied to the city's actual calendar, and search across the City's pages and 18 hosted documents.
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