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Isanti City staff urges website replacement, recommends Revise over CivicPlus
Summary
City staff outlined problems with the current CivicPlus site, said the underlying WebO platform will be unsupported in 2025, and asked council for direction; staff recommended switching to Revise and to provide demos and detailed cost comparisons.
City staff told the Isanti City Council they are recommending a website replacement after identifying search, content-management and accessibility problems with the city’s current CivicPlus site.
In a presentation, Chelsea Hilsheim, city staff, said the existing site “is difficult to find information through the search function” and that staff must re-create pages to change posted dates. She also warned the city’s current platform (WebO) “is becoming obsolete” and will not be supported after September 2025, forcing a migration to CivicPlus’s Web Central if no change is made.
Hilsheim summarized two vendor options in a staff memo and compared implementation schedules, up-front costs and five-year totals. She told the council Revise would take 21–27 weeks to implement, offers spread implementation payments and showed a lower five‑year cost; CivicPlus’s Web Central would take 16–28 weeks and carry a higher annual base fee. Hilsheim recommended Revise and said, “I think Revise is our better bet.”
The staff memo also noted accessibility obligations under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA and a separate set of ADA-related obligations the city must meet by 2027; Hilsheim said compliance work to make PDFs and forms screen‑reader compatible will be an additional cost under any vendor.
Councilmembers asked about specific features: agenda packet integration used by the city’s Granicus/PEAK system, calendar/iCal feeds, and what text/email notification alternatives would cost compared with the CivicReady service. Hilsheim said Revise offers a citizen request center and a text/email notification add-on priced at about $950 annually, while CivicPlus bundles some add-ons but has a higher base fee.
Councilmembers and members of the public asked to see demos and live examples. Hilsheim said she would arrange demos, provide links to example city sites, and return with firm quotes and implementation schedules. She also flagged the recent CivicReady price increase and recommended staff investigate alternative notification services.
The council gave staff direction to gather demos and detailed cost comparisons and return with recommendations for a future council meeting; no final procurement decision was made at the session.
