For years, local governments have faced an unfair choice: pay enterprise prices for a heavyweight municipal platform, or make do with a generic website nobody on staff can maintain.
Meanwhile web technology kept improving. Faster to build with, easier to manage, cheaper to run. The gap between what a municipal website costs and what it should cost got wider every year, and almost nobody built for the towns sitting in the middle of it.
TownFront exists to close that gap. We build for the towns, villages, boroughs and townships that big vendors overlook, and we do not build for anybody else.
The company is young. The work behind it is not. TownFront was built by people with years of hands-on experience delivering and supporting websites for local organizations and municipalities: moving years of minutes without breaking the links residents saved, sitting with a clerk the week before a budget hearing, and answering the phone when something needed fixing before a meeting.
We are not naming prior clients here, because their websites belong to them and not to our marketing. What we can tell you is what the work taught us, and you will find it in every decision on this site.
Five things we believe, and act on
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01
The website is the front door
For most residents, most of the time, the website is town hall. It is open at eleven at night and on a Sunday, and it is where people form an opinion about whether their local government is competent. It should be welcoming, clear, and correct.
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02
Clerks are the real users
Not the administrator who signs the contract and not the committee that reviews the design. The person who has to post the agenda before tonight’s meeting. If a busy clerk cannot update it confidently, it is not finished, whatever it looks like.
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03
Accessibility is not optional
Every resident is entitled to use their town’s website, whatever device or assistive technology they rely on. We would hold that view without the legal requirement, and the legal requirement exists for good reason.
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04
Plain language wins
In the product, in our writing, and in every conversation with your team. If we cannot explain something in a sentence a trustee would understand, we probably have not thought about it hard enough.
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05
Partnership over transactions
Municipal websites live for years and outlast the people who commissioned them. We plan to be there the whole time, which changes what is worth building and what is worth promising.
How we work
Local government is not a side market for us. It is the whole company, which is why the product has opinions instead of options.
We recommend what your community needs, not the largest package we can sell. Sometimes that means telling you a feature is not worth it.
Questions get answered by people who know your site, not by a queue that has never sat through a council meeting.
We maintain and improve the platform centrally, so your site keeps getting better without a disruptive rebuild every few years.
A straightforward conversation about what’s working, what could be better, and whether TownFront is the right fit.