Website Redesign and Implementation Services

The vendor is required to provide website is often the first point of contact for residents, tourists and businesses to find information related to events, programs, and municipal services.
- Discovery phase
• Conduct the project kick-off with the project team. 
• Deliver a project timeline that outlines key dates when town staff are available for feedback, approval and engagement. 
• Conduct background research and a review of the current website, analytics, and past feedback. 
• Conduct a post-research meeting that will clarify direction, goals, and objectives for the new website as they relate to content, design, and technical requirements. 
• This meeting should include elements of the redesign, such as the desired look-and-feel, cites the town likes or dislikes, what design elements should be incorporated, and areas of improvement based on initial research. 
• Document, incorporate and reaffirm the town’s project team feedback from the discovery phase meetings and correspondence into the redesign.
- Planning phase
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive project plan that incorporates research and internal feedback. 
• This plan will serve as the foundation for all project phases and prioritize user experience (UX), effective navigation, and content strategy. 
• This plan should outline major project milestones, timelines, responsibilities, and resource allocations. 
• Provide a sitemap template for the project team to complete. 
• Hold regular, structured virtual meetings (agenda or meeting minutes) with the town’s project team to review progress, address any issues, and align on next steps. 
• Meeting frequency will depend on the requirements set out in the project plan. 
• Document all project decisions, processes, and tasks. 
• Implement industry-standard change management practices to manage any scope changes. this includes:
o A formal change request process
o An evaluation of the proposed modifications with detailed impact assessments
o Clear communication and stakeholder approval procedures
• Prepare a detailed implementation plan covering all aspects of the launch, from technical deployment and training to stakeholder communication and post-launch support.
- Design phase
• Create a website design mock-up that complies with WCAG 2.0 aa (at minimum) and the town’s brand guidelines 
• Outline a process for project team feedback, revisions, and approval. 
• Create a visual style guide that outlines various design features such as active links, buttons, hover states, tab navigation, accordions, emphasis blocks, calls-to-actions, etc.
• A consistent look and feel across all pages, incorporating defined fonts, colors, layout grids, and other elements. 
• Fully designed concepts for:
o Homepage, which should feature news and events
o User navigation and menu
o Secondary and tertiary (child) pages, with the ability to display key links at the top for easier navigation
o News and notices pages
o Calendar
• A design process informed by data-driven research, including usability testing and best practices in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. 
• The navigation structure should be intuitive, streamlined, and designed to serve the needs of residents, visitors, and businesses. 
• A responsive design that provides a full and consistent experience across all major browsers and devices. 
• The solution must be mobile-first, ensuring full feature parity on smartphones and tablets, including alternative navigation layouts for smaller screens. 
• Content designed for the audience by automating content curation rather than only manual content.
- Development phase
• Be built using an open-source CMS. 
• The town’s preference is Drupal (latest stable version at time of launch). 
• Allow webpages to be saved in various states such as draft, unpublished, and published (live). 
• Have a workflow approval functionality for page approval and publishing, which includes:
o Single- or multi-level approvals, sequentially or in parallel
o Definable workflows based on site hierarchy (i.e., section)
o Definable workflows based on role and group-based permissions
o Notifications provided to approvers when approval is required, and to content authors when approval is provided or rejected
• Allow scheduling of automated publishing and unpublishing of content pages. 
• Integrate with APIs from other information systems, including but not limited to ActiveNet and civic web. 
• Support the use of iframes to display information from ArcGIS, YouTube, and other platforms. 
• Allow staff to create “friendly” URL redirects. 
• Allow staff to manually modify URLs. 
• Include a feature-rich, user-friendly, web-based, WYSIWYG content editor that has:
o Drag-and-drop content adding and placement
o The ability to add hyperlinks, images, and other assets (e.g., videos) from within the content editor
o Access to the raw code to facilitate custom programming
• Allow staff to create, modify, and save content types and layouts. 
• Be able to create user roles and groups to ease user administration. 
• Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) or single sign-on (SSO) for site administrators and other backend users. 
• Track changes to individual pages, including when, what and by whom the change was made. 
• Be able to view and restore previous page versions. 
• Have robust and effective search capabilities, specifically the ability for site visitors to search for content and pages within the website. 
• Accept cookies acknowledgment. 
• Include full support for integration with google analytics 4 to collect, analyze, and report web analytics for innisfil.ca. 
• Include capabilities that support the crawling of content, documents and additional metadata properties of assets to maximize search engine optimization (SEO). 
• Support news feeds with different categories, plus the option for users to subscribe to individual categories to receive alerts via email and SMS. 
• Town staff should be able to easily create, edit and remove news categories such as media releases, service disruptions, and job postings. 
• Users should be able to set their preferences and have their sign-up validated via a confirmation email. 
• Include an events calendar that allows:
o For multiple categories and types, which staff can easily add or remove
o For the creation of recurring events, with options for daily, weekly, and monthly recurrences.
o For submissions from members of the public, which require a workflow approval process before the event is shown on the calendar
o Site visitors to toggle between multiple views (list of events and month view at minimum) and search by category, start or end date, and keywords
o Staff to feature or pin events
o Site visitors to subscribe to receive updates through email and SMS
o Site visitors to add to “add to calendar” through .ics or. ical export functionality
• Include an online form development tool for town staff to develop interactive forms. 
• Data should be stored in a database and be able to be exported in a usable format from the CMS. 
• Integration with e-commerce payment gateways is not a requirement at this time. 
• Provide inline spellcheck. grammar and plain language checks would be of added benefit. 
• Provide multilingual capabilities through the use of google translate to present content to visitors in their preferred language of choice. 
• Be able to deploy an alert banner, which can be configurable site-wide or tied to specific pages. 
• Site users should have the option to minimize or close the alert banner. 
• Facilitate the future use of ai tools such as a chatbot. 
• Allow for uploading and organizing images throughout the site, with built-in image editing capabilities such as resizing, cropping, and dynamic scaling based on container size. 
• A tool for creating custom photo slideshows with control over image order, speed, duration and layout would be an added benefit. 
• Support the creation and display of filterable content, allowing users to easily sort or narrow down information based on predefined categories or tags.
- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: June 27, 2025