How to create a city government website

List what residents come to the site to do, then turn those tasks into the main structure. A useful starting point is Services, Departments, Residents, Business, News, Events and Contact. Keep urgent notices, opening hours, phone numbers and service search easy to find.

Do not copy your internal council structure into the menu if residents think in tasks. For each service, decide who owns the content, when it expires and where the user should go next. This prevents the common failure where an attractive homepage links to outdated PDFs and dead ends.

Go to Pages > Add New and create the pages your structure needs. Use parent and child pages for departments and service groups, such as Departments > Planning or Services > Apply for a permit. WordPress pages are intended for non-chronological content and can be organised into hierarchies.

Give each page one clear purpose. Include a short summary, eligibility or requirements, fees if applicable, documents, processing times, contact details and the next action. Use posts for dated news and announcements rather than burying notices inside permanent pages.

Create a page called Home, then create a separate page for News or Updates. In the WordPress reading settings, set the homepage to a static page and select the updates page for posts if your theme provides those choices. Build the homepage with a short welcome, urgent alert area, prominent service links, upcoming events, news and contact details.

If you use a block theme, edit the header, footer, templates and site-wide styles through Appearance > Editor. WordPress block themes let you edit navigation, headers, footers, templates, colours and typography with blocks. The usual Friday-afternoon break is changing a template instead of a single page, then accidentally changing every page on the site, so preview template edits before saving.

Add the published pages to the main navigation and keep the top level short. Put detailed department and service links inside submenus or landing pages rather than making residents scan a long list. With a block theme, open Appearance > Editor > Navigation, create or edit the menu, then add the Navigation block to the header and assign the saved menu to it.

With a classic or hybrid theme, use Appearance > Menus when available, add pages or custom links, drag items to create submenus, and assign the menu to the theme location. If the menu exists but does not appear, check that it was saved, assigned to the header location and not hidden by a different header template or cached page.

Use descriptive headings, plain language, sufficient colour contrast, visible keyboard focus and meaningful link text. Do not put essential instructions only in images or PDFs. Every form field needs a visible label, and error messages should explain how to fix the problem. W3C recommends treating accessibility as part of planning, implementation, testing and ongoing maintenance rather than as a final check.

Publish an accessibility statement with a contact method for reporting barriers, the standard you are working towards, known limitations and any accessible alternatives. Check the site on a phone, with keyboard navigation and with a screen reader before launch. Also confirm that the legal and accessibility requirements for your city and jurisdiction have been reviewed by the responsible authority.

The manual route is fine for a small city site with a modest number of pages: use a suitable block or accessible classic theme, build the page hierarchy, create reusable patterns and add separate plugins for forms, events or directories when required. It gives you more control, but you must design the municipal structure yourself and maintain every template.

For a quicker starting point, consider EGovt. It is built around municipal layouts for departments, services, events and public contact, so you can adapt a government-oriented structure instead of reshaping a generic business theme. Treat its layouts as a starting point: replace demo content, check every template for accessibility, confirm mobile navigation and verify that event, form and payment features work before publishing.