Design study · Town government · North Carolina
A beach town with its house in order
A town website concept for a coastal community whose population multiplies in summer, where visitors and year-round residents need the same site to behave differently.
Concept only. Not the official Town of Duck website.
- Municipal website design
- Visitor and resident tracks
- Coastal alerts
- CMS workflow
- Search
Town of Duck — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A beach town runs two populations out of one government. Summer visitors want beach access, parking, events, and rules they have never read. Year-round residents want permits, meetings, and records. And both need the same thing instantly when weather turns — a coastal town's alert surface is the highest-stakes part of its website and usually the least designed.
The approach
Visitors, residents, and records are given distinct tracks rather than being merged into one menu, so the summer audience does not bury the governance material and vice versa. Coastal alerts are treated as a designed, prominent surface rather than a plugin banner, because during a storm the site's only job is that. A real CMS workflow sits underneath, since alerts and event information are only useful if staff can publish them quickly without a developer.
The result
Fourteen routes covering visitors, residents, and records, with search, coastal alerts, and a staff CMS workflow.
Have something similar in mind?
Need a civic tool with this shape?
Stoa designs and ships resident-facing tools, internal workflows, and public service interfaces that stay fast, legible, and accessible from day one.