New Website, Same Clutter
If your house is full of stuff you don't need, buying a bigger house doesn't fix that. You just have more room to fill. It's a line our web lead Brandon Currie used in a recent webinar, and it's stuck with us since. It's exactly what happens with municipal websites.
We surveyed municipalities across Canada on how their last website refresh actually went. The number that stopped us in our tracks: only 6% said things got meaningfully better. Forty four percent said some things improved, but the same core problems came right back. New CMS, new templates, new domain. Same broken content, same unclear ownership, same email from the councillor asking why nobody can find the dump schedule.
“If you’re a hoarder, you don’t just buy a new house. You have to fix some of your habits and issues before you do it, or you’ll fill up the new house”
Here's the pattern we keep seeing. A municipality picks a new platform expecting it to solve years of accumulated mess. The platform ships. Eighteen months later, the site looks tired again, content is stale, and nobody's quite sure who's supposed to fix it.
The technology was never really the problem. Ownership was.
A few questions worth asking before your next refresh:
● If a page on your site is wrong today, who is responsible for fixing it? Not "IT" in general. A name.
● Who decides what content lives on the site versus what gets handled another way? Is that decision made once, or fought over every time?
● Does your customer service team have a seat at the table when you plan website changes? They're hearing the same questions on the phone that people can't find answers to online.
● Is your homepage getting more attention than your permit application or your report-a-problem form? It shouldn't be. Almost nobody starts there anymore.
“You’ll have a spiffy website for sixteen, eighteen months, and then it starts going downhill unless you put the right operations model in place.”
None of this shows up on a vendor's feature list. It's not a line item you can procure your way out of.
The municipalities that break the cycle treat the website less like a project with an end date and more like a service they run. That means a named owner, a clear process for who decides what, and a habit of checking in on the site the way you'd check in on any other piece of public infrastructure. Not a one time build.
We believe this is one of the most fixable problems in local government. It doesn't take a bigger budget or a longer procurement cycle. It takes clarity about who owns what, and the discipline to keep operating the site well after launch day.
Before your next refresh, do the decluttering first. Fix the habits. Then build the new house.
This topic came up in our recent webinar, New Website, Same Problems — Why CMS Replacement Isn't Enough. If the "decluttering before you rebuild" idea resonated, the full session goes deeper on what actually breaks municipal websites and how to fix it. Watch the replay here
This article was prepared with the assistance of AI.