Committee approves website refresh with Revise, including curated search add-on

The Finance & Taxation Committee on Nov. 2024 approved moving forward with a website refresh by vendor Revise, including the curated search add‑on. The committee took the action after a demonstration by Dylan of Revise and questions about accessibility, payment integration and maintenance.

Dylan, a representative of Revise, said the refreshed designs and tools will be built to meet federal accessibility standards: “we'll ensure that, the design is WCAG 2.1, double a compliant,” he said during the demo. He described three optional add-ons: a curated search that embeds about 100 staff‑provided keywords across pages to surface municipal pages in-site; an AI chatbot that indexes the site and trained documents; and interactive forms that route citizen submissions to specific departments.

Committee members asked about online payment support and integrations; Revise said payment processing can be linked either to existing systems or integrated via services such as Stripe. Staff noted the city already uses a separate “Text My Gov” service for quick Q&A and that Revise can be configured to keep users on the municipal site. The transcript lists the curated search add‑on price as a one‑time $17.50 fee and the ongoing contract figure discussed earlier in the meeting as $49.50 annually; the chatbot was described in the discussion as carrying a recurring $2,400 annual fee. Those figures were read from the vendor presentation and staff remarks on the record.

A motion to proceed with the design refresh by Revise, including the curated search, was made and the clerk called the roll; the motion passed unanimously. The committee directed staff to continue coordinating with the vendor and to return updates as the project proceeds.