Isabella County

Objective: A first-class county website the county actually owns

Isabella County sits in the heart of central Michigan, home to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, Central Michigan University, and more than twenty townships, cities, and villages. Its website is where residents pay taxes, look up court calendars, find meeting minutes, and reach a dozen different departments.

Most municipal website platforms come with high monthly fees, long-term contracts, and a catch: the county never really owns its own site. Isabella County wanted something better. A first-class design, a world-class content management system, and the ability for county staff to run the site day to day without being locked into a vendor.

The county put the project out for competitive bid. Web Ascender’s solution and approach stood out from the field, and the county chose us to build it.

What Web Ascender Did

• A custom WordPress theme built for the county - rather than bend a stock theme to fit, we designed and engineered a highly specialized theme that takes the design further and gives residents a modern, engaging, easy-to-navigate site
• Accessibility from the ground up - a public website has to work for everyone, so accessible design and development guided every decision from color and typography to navigation and forms
• A department-by-department editing model - each county department has its own access to its own section of the site, and we trained every team on how to manage it
• Centralized documents, forms, and PDFs - one library for the county’s forms and documents, tagged and organized so the right files surface in the right places across the site
• Centralized minutes and agendas - board and committee minutes and agendas live in one system and are tagged to appear automatically wherever they belong
• Calendar of events, news, and a robust forms system - the tools residents use most, built into the CMS so staff can keep them current without a developer

The Outcome

Isabella County has a website that looks the part and works for everyone who visits it. More than a dozen content editors across county departments manage their own pages, documents, and announcements with permissions scoped to their area, and residents can find what they need without digging.

The county owns its website outright, with no platform fees and no long-term contract. Since launching in 2019, the county team has handled all of its own content updates and needs little to no help from us, though we’re always a call away. Web Ascender takes care of the rest: managed hosting, security, WordPress and plugin updates, and uptime, so the site stays fast, safe, and current without the county having to think about it.