Website Redevelopment Services

The Vendor is required to provide websites for the library and tourism section) that is modern, accessible, secure and user-focused, enhancing service delivery, improving public engagement and supporting long-term organizational needs.
- Minimum mandatory specifications
1. Backend functionality
•    Enable multiple levels of customizable roles and access, including but not limited to super administrators, administrators and editors, who can manage content independently, efficiently and effectively.
•    Staff should be empowered to manage and update website content independently, while the vendor remains available to provide support and implement changes as needed
•    Include a dashboard for super-users to monitor internal governance and compliance
•    Integrate with a town-owned google analytics or a similar tool to easily track and download visitor data, such as top search terms, no results search, click through, sessions, users, page views, bounce rate, locations and referrals, task tracking and service area reporting, across various time periods
•    Use clean and descriptive URLs, while providing the ability to customize external URLs to enhance user experience and SEO.
2. Branding
•    Ensure websites align with city new branding and visual identity guidelines (as referenced in the appendices)
•    Develop and deliver a website style guide, aligned with the town’s brand and style, ensuring visual consistency, usability and long-term maintainability of the website
•    Integrate corporate brand fonts to ensure a consistent visual identity across the website
3. Bylaw directory and database
•    Include an intuitive bylaw directory database that allows users to easily search, filter and browse applicable bylaws with clear categorization
•    Create a designated and separate search function for bylaws.
4. Content management software (CMS)
•    Built on an open-source platform, with a bid outlining the chosen platform, the rationale for its selection and the benefits it provides 
•    CMS core platform and modules and plugins must be kept current in accordance with the vendor’s supported release cycle and security patch process
•    CMS should have content security and control of different user permissions 
•    Enable image and video uploads with easy resizing and placement, ensuring all content automatically adjusts for responsive viewing 
•    Ability for roles to be scoped by department, microsite or content type and content approval function 
•    The solution must support transition to another vendor or hosting provider without requiring full redevelopment of core site functionality
•    The CMS must support the management of all typical media types, including but not limited to images, video, audio, documents and other formats specified in this RFP and the vendor’s proposal 
•    Content approval with the draft and publish functionality 
•    Maintain detailed audit logs of administrative and user activity for a minimum of a year 
•    Ability to view, compare and restore previous versions of single pages 
•    Inclusion of a built-in or suitable plugin and third-party tool that allows staff to easily build and publish a variety of forms and surveys on the website 
•    Include preview functionality and in-context, inline content editing directly within page views of efficient updates and maintenance 
•    Compatible with modern browsers (chrome, edge, Firefox and safari), supporting at minimum current and previous major versions 
•    Ability to schedule future content postings and automatically expire content
•    Solution must support routine CMS and plugin and module upgrades without requiring reimplementation of core site functionality or full site redevelopment 
•    CMS and websites must be built on an open source and non-proprietary platform. 
•    Any custom development must be documented and provided to the town, and the website must remain maintainable and upgradeable without vendor lock-in or reimplementation 
•    Proponent must list the CMS and platform and major components and clearly identify which are open source, proprietary, or third-party services 
•    Where an open-core model is used, the proponent must identify which key capabilities are delivered through proprietary modules or services and any associated licensing or subscription costs 
•    Proponent must describe how the town can transition to another vendor or hosting arrangement, including what artifacts will be provided (code, configuration, content exports) and any dependencies that may limit portability
•    Proponent must describe how customizations will be tested and maintained during major CMS upgrades
5. Documents and media library
•    Enable image and video uploads with easy resizing and placement, ensuring all content automatically adjusts for responsive viewing 
•    Integration with SharePoint or best practice document library to centrally manage town documents and make them easily accessible throughout the site 
•    Hierarchy of parent documents and sub-documents 
•    The SharePoint or best practice library search function should operate site-wide, with specialized filtering options for specific sections, features and both published and unpublished documents 
•    Easy uploading, replacing and management of document and media files
•    Ability to create short links to documents in the media library 
•    Secure upload and download capability
6. Events calendar
•    Viewable in a monthly grid or list version, by category and location 
•    A separate detail page for each event that allows you to incorporate additional information 
•    Ability to add photos, videos or other rich content to the detail page 
•    Integration with social media (Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube) for social promotion 
•    Easy process for staff to publish and approve event submissions 
•    Ability to export calendar events to iOS, google, android and common calendar applications such as MS outlook or google Gmail 
•    Ability to add different types or categories of entries to the calendar (schedule changes, holiday hours, closures, etc.) 
•    Filtering options for events to display on separate, category-specific calendars (e.g. Council, fire department, love, city, library, etc. that align with those event types and embed onto pages 
•    Easy process for updating recurring events and duplicating content year-over-year
7. Information architecture and search
•    Create global, local, utility and footer menus, that help core user groups quickly find information and complete tasks with minimal clicks 
•    Ability to toggle between popular links for residents, businesses, visitors and to find additional resources 
•    Organize labels, links and breadcrumbs in a logical and consistent manner 
•    Include an effective internal and external search function that follows SEO best practices, metadata and breadcrumbs to deliver accurate results 
•    Includes a predictive search feature that corrects spelling, includes variations of terms (stemming) and uses synonyms 
•    Ability to create a dedicated search for key areas of the site, such as bylaws and council 
•    Ability to easily remove pages or documents from being crawled by the search engine, to prevent outdated or incorrect content from appearing in the search results 
•    Include AI search integration, ensuring the correct information is pulled in AI searches 
•    Advanced search options such as keyword matching, date range, subject filters, etc.
8. Social media
•    Option to automatically post news to social media from the website 
•    Option to share website content on social media platforms
- Hosting, maintenance and support
•    Web server availability—a minimum of 99.95% uptime (based on a rolling 30-day period) 
•    All town data must be stored and processed in country, including backups and logs. 
•    Vendor must identify any third-party tools and services that store or process town data (including monitoring and support tools) and confirm their data residency
•    Vendor must provide backups, including defined backup frequency (minimum nightly), retention and the ability to perform a restore when required.
•    The solution must allow the town to retrieve town data (including content, media, forms and audit logs), in commonly used, non-proprietary formats (e.g., comma-separated values (CSV) or JavaScript object notation (JSON)) to support reporting, MFIPPA and FOI and records retention.
•    Site wide secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption
•    Web application firewall with distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) prevention.