Town of Grove — Official Municipal Website

Full custom WordPress theme, two hand-coded plugins, Town Clerk portal, and automated GA4 monthly reporting for a small Allegany County municipality

Town governments run on paper, deadlines, and one or two people doing six jobs each. The Town of Grove needed a website that fit how they actually work — not one that added another thing to manage.

What They Had Before

Almost nothing. Meeting minutes and local laws lived as loose PDF files with no central place to find them. Residents calling the Town Hall to ask when the next board meeting was, or to get a copy of a form, were taking up staff time that could have gone somewhere else. The old site was built on a service that had backed the town into a corner — the Clerk could not add a document without calling someone for help, and waiting.

That is the part that matters. It was not that the site looked dated. It was that nobody at the Town Hall could change it.

What We Built

A complete town website with six sections: Home, Government, Minutes & Agendas, Local Laws & Forms, Our Community, and Local Businesses. Everything a resident calls about is now on the site, and everything on the site can be updated by the town without a phone call.

The design was built for this town specifically — the photography, the navy and gold, the layout. It is not a template with the town’s name dropped into it. Nothing else looks like it because nothing else is it.

The Town Clerk Runs It Herself

This was the whole point. We built a private staff area that only does the things the Clerk actually needs to do — post meeting minutes, add agendas, publish notices, update forms. Everything else in the system is hidden. There is no menu to get lost in and nothing she can accidentally break.

She logs in, uploads the document, and it appears on the site where residents expect it. That is the entire process. No training manual, no support ticket, no waiting on us.

And We Handle Everything Else

The town posts their documents. We take care of the rest of it — the hosting, the domain, the email accounts, the security updates, the backups, and the monitoring that tells us the site is down before anyone at the Town Hall notices.

None of that ever lands on the Clerk’s desk. She was hired to run a town office, not to renew certificates and install updates. The division is simple: they handle the content, because they are the ones who know it. We handle the machine it runs on.

When They Need Something, They Get Us

Bigger changes — a new section, a new form, a page reorganized before an election — go through us. They send an email and we answer it. No portal, no ticket number, no support queue in another time zone. Every message gets a response within twelve hours, and it comes from the people who built the site.

That is the arrangement. The town has a web department. They just don’t have to hire one.

A Monthly Report, Written in English

Most website analytics tools are built for marketing departments. Nobody at a town hall has time to learn one, and they shouldn’t have to.

So on the first of every month, the town gets an email. It says how many people visited the site, which pages they looked at, and where they came from — in plain sentences, not charts and acronyms. Nobody has to log into anything. It just shows up.

The History Section

The Our Community page was rebuilt from the town’s own historical records — the founding as Church Tract, the Hamlet of Swain and the man it was named for, the railroad, the origin of the local ski slopes. It was reorganized into a timeline you can actually read instead of a PDF you have to download.

Every name, date, title, and email address on the site was reviewed line by line with the Town Supervisor before launch. On a government site, getting that right is not a detail.

Fast, and Findable

The site scores 96 out of 100 on Google’s speed test and loads in under two seconds. That matters for a practical reason: a resident pulling up the meeting schedule on their phone from a parking lot on rural service should not be sitting there watching a blank screen.

It is also built so search engines can read it properly. Somebody searching for the Town of Grove finds the town’s own site first — not a third-party directory with wrong information on it.

What Something Like This Costs

It depends on the town, and we would rather tell you honestly than post a number that turns out to be wrong for you. A town with four pages and a part-time clerk is a different project than one with a planning board, a court, and twenty years of minutes to organize.

So the first conversation is a free consultation, and it is an actual conversation — what you have now, what your residents keep calling about, who would be doing the updating, and what you are working with for a budget. You get a straight number for the build and a straight number for the monthly, and you can take it to the board.

No forms to fill out and nothing to sign to find out. Reach out and we will talk it through.

Under the Hood

For anyone who wants the technical version: the theme is hand-coded PHP and CSS with no page builder anywhere in it. Two custom plugins were written specifically for this site — one that controls the editing environment, and one that manages meetings, documents, notices, and forms through custom database tables. A restricted WordPress role was built for the Clerk. The monthly report is a scheduled script pulling from the Google Analytics API. Hosting is managed, DNS runs through Cloudflare, and SSL is issued and renewed automatically.