Town of Gull Lake
At A glance
- Four-pillar navigation to guide residents in a format that is easy to understand: Residents, Recreation, Business, Council.
- Community Calendar that is filterable, searchable, with categories that can be pulled into each section of the site.
- Council minutes online back to 2022: already past the required five-year retention bar.
- Monthly meetings documented, special meetings included.
- Newsletter signup, notices, bylaws, business development, business directory, Facebook link.
The Challenge
Gull Lake is a busy town with a curling rink, a bowling alley, a museum, a golf course, a campground and a main street that people are actively trying to grow. All of that was competing for attention with the stuff residents need from a town office: waste pickup days, cemetery records, permits, and what council actually decided last Wednesday.
We split the site into four audiences and gave each its own front door:
- Residents — cemetery, education, event rental, health services, property, waste & recycling, worship
- Recreation — camping, golfing, swimming, skating, curling, bowling, the museum, community calendar
- Business — a searchable directory, a downtown section, new-business resources, and a link out to the Invest Gull Lake site
- Council — bylaws, meetings & minutes, permits & licences, public notices, emergency services, and a bylaw-complaint form
The homepage then pulls the time-sensitive material up above everything else: a news feed (hydrant flushing dates, the new Visitor Guide) and an events strip that puts the Main St. Revival Market and the next Town Council meeting side by side. A newsletter signup sits at the bottom of every page.
The nice detail: the council meeting appears in the public events calendar with the instruction to contact the office by Monday at 5 p.m. to get on the agenda. Transparency isn't just publishing the record afterward, it's also telling people how to be in the room.
KEy Takeaways
Adding a new set of minutes is a CMS form: upload the PDF, type the date, pick the year, publish. It lands in the right year tab automatically and surfaces at the top of the list.
- Repeating content types: a notice, a minute, a bylaw, a permit, an event all upload with one short form. Fill it in, publish, go.
- Files that file themselves: upload a PDF, pick a date. It will populate in the right year, in the right order, on every page it belongs on.
- Publish once, appear everywhere: homepage "most recent" lists, section pages and quick links all update from a single entry.
- No developer in the loop: no email strings, no complicated FTP, no waiting, no hourly billing.
- Hard to break: staff edit content, the design stays the same.
Is your municipality ready for the new rules?
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