Work / City of Northline
City government
City of Northline
A service-first city website. Permits, council business, and department news share one publishing model, so residents stop hunting and clerks stop waiting on the vendor.
The problem
Northline’s site had grown as a stack of department microsites sharing a header and little else. Building permits lived in a PDF. Council agendas were uploaded the morning of the meeting, sometimes. The communications office was the only group with logins, and they had two people.
The approach
We mapped the ten tasks that generated most of the front-desk calls, then designed templates for those tasks before touching the homepage. The permit path became a structured service: what it is, who qualifies, what to bring, what it costs, and a start button. Council became a meeting type with agenda, packet, video, and minutes — not a news post with attachments.
The homepage got quieter because the tasks got specific.
What shipped
- A Drupal build with department roles and a shared component library
- Service pages for permits, utilities, records, and jobs
- Redirects from the old department URLs and a content freeze plan for cutover
- Editor training using Northline’s own next agenda, not sample copy
What changed
Online permit starts rose because the form was no longer behind a PDF and a phone number. Department staff published routine updates themselves. Communications kept the alerts, the homepage, and the exceptions.