Blog
Notes on public-sector websites.
Practical writing for the people who run park district and municipal websites — accessibility, content, and the processes behind both.
All articles
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AI Chatbots for Local Government: What City Staff Need to Know
An AI assistant does not create answers, it retrieves them. That single fact decides almost everything about whether one helps your residents or embarrasses your agency. This guide covers what grounding actually means, the questions worth asking in a demonstration, which resident questions should never be automated, and the governance an assistant needs once it is live.
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How Cities and Park Districts Can Improve PDF Accessibility
Most local-government websites publish far more PDFs than pages. Agendas, minutes, recreation guides and forms accumulate for years, and many were never built to be read by assistive technology. This guide covers how to inventory what you have, decide what to fix first, and set up a publishing process that stops the backlog growing again.
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24/7 Resident Support: How AI Chatbots Can Help Park Districts
Park district questions do not keep office hours. Registration opens early, weather closures land on a Saturday morning, and parents plan their week at nine at night. This guide covers when enquiries actually arrive, which ones automate well and which must always reach a person, and the content that has to be in place before any of it works.
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AI Chatbot vs. Traditional Website Search: What’s the Difference?
A search box finds pages that contain your words. An assistant reads those pages and tells you the answer. Both are useful, they fail in different ways, and most local-government websites need both. This guide sets out what each is actually good at, where each one breaks, and how to tell which is failing your residents right now.
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How Cities Can Reduce Repetitive Resident Questions with AI
Every city answers the same handful of questions thousands of times a year. AI can absorb some of that volume, but the larger win is usually upstream: a page rewritten, a form simplified, a process that stops generating the question at all. This guide covers how to find your real list, the three ways to remove a repeated question, and the order to work in.
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Using Website Search Insights to Understand Resident Needs
Every search a resident types is them telling you what they came for, in their own words, unprompted. Most agencies never read it. This guide covers the four signals worth looking for, how to run a review in an afternoon, how to turn a list of queries into content decisions, and what search data cannot tell you.
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What Happens When Residents Can’t Find Information on Your Website?
When a resident cannot find something, the need does not disappear — it moves. It becomes a phone call, an email, a visit, or a wrong answer from a neighbour. This guide follows where that cost actually lands, why none of it appears in your website analytics, which pages are most expensive to fail on, and how to find your own failures.