TownCrier

Technologies Used

- PHP
- Laravel
- Vue.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- MySQL
- Artificial Intelligence

TownCrier is a complete municipal website and communications platform designed to make public information easier to manage and easier for residents to find. Each municipality receives its own website, domain, branding, and content while benefiting from a shared platform that is centrally hosted, secured, maintained, and improved.

The platform brings council information, agendas and minutes, bylaws, documents, news, events, alerts, recreation information, and online forms together in one place. It gives small municipal teams a practical way to maintain a professional website without needing dedicated technical staff.

A Shared Platform for Municipal Websites

We built TownCrier as a multi-tenant application that can support many independently branded municipal websites from one architecture. A guided provisioning system creates a new website, applies its theme and branding, configures its domain, and invites staff through a single workflow with a live preview throughout the process.

This shared foundation makes it possible to deliver security updates, performance improvements, accessibility fixes, and new features across the entire platform while keeping each municipality's users, content, settings, and public website separate.

Simple Content Management

We developed a content management system around the everyday work performed by municipal staff. Instead of asking users to construct pages or write code, TownCrier provides structured tools for pages, news, events, council members, meetings, bylaws, documents, alerts, facilities, forms, and resident requests.

Clear publishing states, scheduled content, role-based permissions, revision history, and bilingual English and French workflows help staff keep information accurate. Online forms and a tracked submissions inbox also replace downloadable paperwork and shared email threads with an organized process inside the platform.

AI-Assisted Municipal Workflows

We built an AI website assistant that allows staff to create and update content using plain language. It can prepare pages, notices, events, summaries, image descriptions, and French translation drafts while respecting the permissions of the signed-in user.

Every change remains under human control. Content is kept as a draft, and actions that affect the public website require staff review and explicit confirmation. We also developed a meeting-minutes workflow that turns an uploaded council recording into structured draft minutes for staff to review, edit, and approve.

Resident Services and Document Search

TownCrier extends beyond website publishing with tools that help residents find information and interact with their municipality. The platform includes searchable document libraries, subscriptions and alerts, problem reporting, facility booking requests, online payments, and an optional resident-facing assistant grounded in published municipal content.

We designed the document archive to work with the formats municipalities already use, including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and scanned files. AI-assisted search can identify relevant passages inside published documents and links residents back to the original source instead of relying on document titles alone.

Monitoring and Performance Dashboards

We built centralized dashboards that give the TownCrier team a clear view of the health and performance of every municipal website on the platform. Site availability, response times, SSL certificate status, domain configuration, accessibility scores, and recent incidents can all be monitored from one place.

Automatic health checks identify outages and performance problems as they happen, while incident history makes it easier to investigate recurring issues and confirm when service has recovered. The dashboards also help us spot slow pages, expiring certificates, configuration problems, and accessibility regressions before they become larger problems for municipal staff or residents.

This platform-wide visibility allows a small support team to manage many independent websites reliably. Instead of waiting for someone to report a problem, we can respond proactively and use real performance data to guide ongoing infrastructure and application improvements.

Accessibility, Performance, and Reliability

Accessibility is built into the platform rather than treated as a one-time launch task. We created responsive templates, colour-contrast checks, automated accessibility testing, ongoing monitoring, and plain-language reporting to support WCAG 2.1 AA websites as their content changes over time.

We also optimized public pages for fast mobile performance and built centralized monitoring for domains, SSL certificates, outages, backups, and site health. This gives residents a fast, dependable experience while making it easier to operate and support every website from one place.