Our project manager Loreal spent the first week of the project counting, cataloging, and grouping every existing page on the old site. The result was clarifying. The 55 pages fell into eight repeating styles. Galleries, list pages, content pages, directories, and a few one-off layouts. We designed those eight templates once, then duplicated them across every section of the site. The savings from that approach is what made a small-budget municipal rebuild feasible.
We rebuilt the site on WordPress with Elementor and fast VPS Cloudways hosting. The old site's plugin and theme conflicts went away because the new build uses one page builder, one theme, and a tested plugin stack. Staff edits now stay edited, and a page edited by accounting doesn't break when recreation services opens it the next day.
We added the features the Town actually needed and removed the ones it didn't. A custom business and resource directory grouped by category. An events calendar wired into the dashboard. A volunteer driver schedule that accounting could update manually as a table. Multi-recipient contact forms routing to the right department. A GIS link. Council agendas and bylaws organized under a "BUILD Bassano" section.
We coordinated a Google Drive content workflow so Amanda could upload content section by section as she verified it for accuracy. Photography was scheduled around three town events Amanda flagged in May, including the BBQ Competition, so the new site would launch with real photos of real Bassano. Before that shoot, the only professional photography the Town had was of the councillors.
A municipal rebuild on a fixed budget only works if every decision is made with the budget visible on the wall.
Before any design work started, we audited every page on the existing site. 55 pages, 8 layout types, one spreadsheet. That document drove every downstream decision, from how many templates we needed to which pages got consolidated. By the time design started, we knew exactly what we were building and exactly how long each piece would take.
We set up a staging environment within the first week, so Amanda and her staff could click through the real layouts on the real hosting before launch. Loom videos walked staff through editing posts, swapping photos, updating the volunteer driver schedule, and managing the events calendar. That training material is still in use two years after launch.
The new site went live at bassano.ca on August 6, 2024, fourteen weeks after the project began. Within 24 hours we had small adjustments queued and the events calendar dropdown fixed. The Town has continued to use the site to roll out council minutes, policies, business directory updates, and seasonal initiatives across every department.
We designed a fast, intuitive site that was simple for staff to use and scalable as the town grew.
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