Website Redesign Implementation Hosting and Technical Support Services

The Vendor is required to provide website redesign, implementation, hosting, and technical support services to the corporation.
- Local government websites serve as the primary communications tool, acting as the central hub for residents, businesses, and visitors to access essential information, engage with municipal services, and stay informed about community initiatives.
- Key challenges include:
•    Accessibility Compliance: Current websites fail to meet WCAG Level AA 2.0 standards, creating barriers for users with disabilities. Ensuring full compliance with accessibility guidelines is a top priority.
•    Bilingual Integration: Inadequate multi-language functionalities hinder municipalities' ability to effectively serve their diverse communities. Seamless bilingual integration is critical to addressing this gap.
•    Timely and Effective Support: Limited internal resources make it difficult for small teams to resolve technical issues quickly, leading to service disruptions and inefficiencies. Faster response times, proactive issue resolution, and reliable ongoing support are crucial to maintaining seamless operations.
- Objectives
•    Ensuring openness and transparency while encouraging community engagement.
•    Delivering high-quality services efficiently and cost-effectively.
•    Building a future-ready platform that meets both current and evolving needs. 
•    The following elements will help achieve these objectives.
- Usability
•    Make it easy for customers (residents, businesses, visitors, intergovernmental partners, and other interested parties) to navigate and find information and services.
•    The website must be act compliant with WCAG. Level AA 2.0 (or higher) and viewable/navigable on multiple platforms (including smart phones and tablets), resolutions and web browsers using responsive web design.
•    Design and function should be focused on intuitive and familiar navigation mechanisms and prominently feature high-priority or targeted content for the various website user audiences.
•    The site must enhance integration with interactive applications such as social media.
•    Users will be able to create a personalized experience based on their preferences.
- Sustainability
•    Develop an information architecture that is efficient, easily understood, and sustainable by staff in the future.
•    Implement a content management solution that can be maintained by both experienced web development staff as well as business users with no coding experience. 
•    Necessary functionality includes: the creation of templates, WYSIWYG editing to facilitate content management by novice users, act compliance, responsive design, and content approval workflows and search engine friendly URL aliasing.
- Marketing/Branding
•    The websites help promote the corporations’ goals, identities and messages.
•    Webpages are visited by prospective businesses and prospective residents, and the redesigned websites need to be representative of the dynamic communities and the vibrant economy.
•    The website consists of approximately 875 pages (500 of these are pages from our news feed and only about 50 would be transferred). 
•    The township’s website averages 430 visitors per day. In 2024, the website had 158k visitors for a combined total of 553k page views.
- Accessibility
•    Website must conform and maintain compliance with the World Wide Web consortium content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA standards, and meet all current requirements, best practices, and guidelines for all audience where possible. 
•    The website should require staff to verify text, image, and content compliancy with WCAG 2.0 level AA when uploading to the website.
•    A “term of reference and general conditions” page should be available and easily found by visitors to outline the limitations of the website’s accessibility functionalities.
•    All page templates must be 100% compliant with the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA. 
•    This includes compliance with styles, dimensions, and functionalities to ensure accessibility for all users, including those with disabilities.
- Bilingualism
•    At this time, the corporations’ website is bilingual, running a parallel language site in French and English. 
•    To keep our site easy for residents, there must be a button to link each page to the alternate language page for that particular content, such as our current website. 
•    This feature must be available for the corporation to use and implement on both existing and new pages.
- Content, Search Engine Optimization, Hosting
•    The successful proponent must demonstrate experience in developing a website structure with vast amounts of content from the end-user's perspective.
•    The corporation will provide written content to the selected proponent for the website. 
•    The proponent will populate content provided into the new website. 
•    All content and data uploaded to the website will remain the property of the corporation.
•    User-friendly, customizable, bilingual and advanced search tool that is search engine optimized.
•    A-z listing of municipal services and programs.
•    Emergency notification banner and pop-up alert or proposed alternative solution.
•    Icon/quick-links on main page, customizable by municipal staff based on seasonal topics (budget icon during budget discussions, winter maintenance in the snowy season, road closures and construction during summer, etc.).
•    The website will have an independent hosting environment with dedicated country-based server and maintain its own domain.
•    The website must be secured with an independent SSL/TLS certificate to ensure encrypted communications and data protection. 
•    The solution must support auto-renewing SSL certificates and enforce https across all pages to prevent data interception and enhance cybersecurity compliance with country privacy laws.
- Look and Feel
•    The website must provide a sleek, modern look. 
•    It must also offer a design that strategically uses the user’s screen space.
•    Easily identifiable search bar is available to the user on any page.
•    Users can subscribe to news/alerts and receive them by email in their chosen language.
•    Attractive and polished fonts, and layout.
- CMS
•    The website is required to have a friendly end-user CMS that is powerful but easy to learn. 
•    Must be able to be maintained by municipal staff who have no coding experience. 
•    The solution must be flexible and scalable to allow municipal staff to add, change and delete content (visual and text) at any point in time, as well as to maintain current online municipal services and add additional services and technology at a future date.
•    The CMS must have a “restore previous version” for each page.
•    The CMS solution must be hosted in country.
•    The CMS manufacturer shall provide corporate technical support to the corporation.
•    Easy setup of short URLS, friendly URLS, or URL re-directs.
•    Broken URL link reports, potentially with notification to the webmaster.
•    The CMS must enable user and/or role-based permissions to be configured in order to control what system features and data users can access, in addition to a history log that lists recent page update details.
•    The platform must allow the corporation to easily change the content. 
•    This includes the ability to modify, add, or delete menus. 
•    The content management system should be user-friendly and intuitive, enabling non-technical staff to make updates without requiring extensive technical knowledge.
•    The CMS must support SSL/TLS encryption at all levels, ensuring end-to-end security from content management to public access. 
•    All administrative portals must require secure https connections with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent unauthorized access.
- Responsive Design
•    Many of our website visitors are on mobile or tablet devices. 
•    The new website must be incredibly mobile-responsive and have a design that adapts to the user’s specific screen size, platform and orientation.
•    The features/portlets must adapt to various formats based on the user’s screen size and orientation, and in order of importance/priority of feature, instead of “squishing” content or only using benchmark screens sizes to adapt.
•    The website development solution must offer the possibility to preview the desktop, mobile, and tablet views of the site before publishing any changes. 
•    This ensures that content is optimized and properly displayed across all devices. 
•    The website should integrate a Chatbot AI with virtual assistant capabilities. 
•    This feature should be able to assist visitors by answering common questions, providing information, and guiding users to the appropriate sections of the website. 
•    The Chatbot must support multi-language, including English and French to accommodate the diversity of the township.
•    To ensure optimal performance across all devices, the website will be integrated with a content delivery network (CDN) to improve load speeds and regional accessibility while maintaining independent performance monitoring.

- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: September 02, 2025