Departments & Contacts

Every office with its hours, its people and its phone numbers, where residents expect to find them.

Contact information is the most quietly damaging thing to get wrong. A wrong number or a departed employee sends a resident somewhere unhelpful, and they call the main line instead. On many town sites the staff directory was accurate the year it was built.

A department page worth callingHours, a direct number and a person, rather than a general inbox and a PDF org chart.

Illustration with invented content.

What a resident wants from a department page

A person, a phone number and the hoursNot a general inbox and a PDF of an org chart from two administrations ago. The single most requested thing on a municipal website is how to reach somebody who can answer.
Boards get real pagesMembers, meeting nights and their own agenda archive.
Change it onceA new phone number updates everywhere it appears.
Hours that are trueIncluding the ones that change over a holiday.

What residents get

A general inbox and an org chart PDF is not contact information. Each department page carries its hours, a direct number, and the name of a person who can answer, which is the single most requested thing on a municipal website.

Phone numbers appear on the department page, the staff directory and three unrelated pages that mention them. Changing one record changes all of them, which is why the numbers on a TownFront site stay right.

A resident looking for the shade tree commission wants its members, its meeting night and its agendas. A board with its own page is a board residents can actually participate in.

Nothing damages trust faster than driving to a closed municipal building. Holiday and seasonal hours can be set by the person who knows, on the day they find out.

What staff get

A name and a number appear on the department page, in the staff directory, and on three unrelated pages that happen to mention them. One record feeds all of them, which is why the numbers on a TownFront site stay right.

The clerk's office updates the clerk's office. It is a small permission, and it is the reason contact details get corrected the day they change instead of at the next redesign.

A blank where a name used to be tells a resident nothing. Marking the role vacant and pointing at the person covering it answers the question they arrived with.

Nothing damages trust faster than driving to a closed municipal building. Seasonal and holiday hours are set by the person who knows, on the day they find out.

The details that decide whether someone calls

  • Contact details carry structured data, so search engines can show the right number without the resident opening the site at all
  • Every department page states what to do outside office hours, which is when a good share of visits happen
  • Accessibility applies here too: the directory is navigable by keyboard and readable by a screen reader

Included in every TownFront site

This is part of the core product, not an add-on module. Every TownFront website includes it, and it is built to the same standard as the rest of the site: fast on an ordinary phone connection, navigable by keyboard, readable by a screen reader, and maintainable by your own staff.

See how this would work for your community. Request a conversation and we will walk through your current site and what changes.

Other capabilities

Residents do not call town hall because they enjoy it. They call because the website did not tell them.

The measure of a department page

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