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Morrisville unveils redesigned town website, staff touts accessibility and search improvements
Summary
Town communications staff showed a redesigned Morrisville website on Oct. 28, highlighting improved search and navigation, consolidated calendars, accessibility upgrades and new analytics; staff said minutes are not yet migrated and IT is evaluating chatbot integration.
Morrisville Communications and Outreach Manager Erin Hudson and Public Information Officer Rox Cruz presented the town's redesigned website to the Town Council on Oct. 28, saying the redesign aimed to improve navigation, mobile responsiveness and accessibility while removing outdated content.
Hudson said staff relied on user surveys, heat maps and vendor-supported user testing during a year-long process that led to the new site, which launched Oct. 6. “We wanted a website that truly reflected not only our internal workforce, but also our community,” she said, noting improved discoverability and better back-end content management for staff.
Rox Cruz demonstrated features of the new site, including color-coded banners to signal urgency, a video-focused landing area, consolidated calendars driven by content labels, a service-finder tool, accordion/tabbed pages to reduce clicks, and built-in translation for the town’s top languages. Cruz also described integration with the vendor’s video and question/answer tool and said staff plan quarterly heat maps for the first year to guide further tweaks.
Councilmembers welcomed the aesthetics and functionality but pressed staff on search quality and the availability of historic minutes. Councilmember Robotti said some document links and minutes were currently missing from the public site; Cruz and IT staff said minutes have not yet been migrated and the town is conducting a separate procurement process for an agenda-and-minutes vendor. “For now, the public has to go through my office to access minutes,” a staff member said.
Members asked about planned chatbot or AI features. Cruz said the website’s current search pulls only town content and video; a broader chatbot that could pull from external sources (county or partner agencies) is being explored with IT. Staff said they are also evaluating whether to integrate the vendor’s chatbot with other tools so residents do not see multiple floating help widgets.
Hudson said the communications team will begin a six-week public campaign the day after the presentation to highlight features and solicit user feedback, and plans a follow-up user-experience survey roughly 60 days post-launch. She asked residents to report any accessibility or navigation problems through the site’s feedback feature.
The presentation concluded with a pledge to continue refining search and document access and to pursue an agenda/minutes provider that supports the council’s search needs.
