There is a common challenge facing fast-growing communities across the country: municipal websites that can’t keep pace with the town’s evolution. Nearly eight years ago, the Town of Pike Road, Alabama, launched a website using a do-it-yourself platform. At the time, it served its purpose well. But as Pike Road grew, the website became a digital attic. Multiple departments added content over the years, leading to a fragmented user experience. Important resources were buried, and the backend became increasingly difficult for staff to maintain.
Dogwood has worked with government agencies throughout the United States – some we can’t even disclose here in writing – but as a Pike Road-based agency, this project was extra special for our team. It was a mission to build a modern, accessible, and easily managed digital front door for our own community.
Today, we are proud to showcase PikeRoad.us, a website we believe serves as the gold standard blueprint for local governments looking to upgrade their civic web presence.
1. Upgrading the User Experience (UX) and Interface
A municipal website has to serve thousands of people with entirely different goals. A resident might be looking for city council minutes, while a visitor might be looking for an arts festival.
Our first priority was a complete overhaul of the User Interface (UI). We chose WordPress as our Content Management System (CMS) and paired it with the Elementor builder. This combination enabled us to create a beautiful, modern, and highly responsive design that works flawlessly on mobile devices, ensuring residents can access town services whether on a desktop or a phone.
2. Dynamic Features Built for Transparency & Efficiency
We didn’t just want the site to look better; we wanted it to work smarter. We engineered several key features to eliminate duplicate data entry for staff and streamline navigation for residents:
The “Enter Once, Populate Everywhere” Calendar
Previously, updating community calendars required tedious, repetitive data entry. We built a modern, categorized event calendar that does the heavy lifting automatically.
- How it works: When town staff enter a community event into the master calendar, they simply tag the relevant department or committee.
- The result: An event tagged for the Pike Road Arts Council automatically populates the master calendar and streams directly to the Pike Road Arts Council Committee Page. No double-entry required.
Centralized Town Council Hubs
True civic transparency means making public information easy to find. Previously, residents had to hunt down agendas on one page, minutes on another, and leave the website entirely to search YouTube for meeting videos.
- The New Standard: On the Town Council and Planning Commission pages, meeting agendas, official notes, and video recordings are now centralized in one single location, neatly organized by date.
3. Accessibility as a Priority, Not an Afterthought
A public website must be usable by everyone, including residents with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities. For many municipalities, ADA compliance is a stressful legal checkbox. For Dogwood, it’s a core value.
One of our developers, Stephanie Qrys, has a deep passion for web accessibility. Using Elementor’s built-in accessibility framework alongside rigorous manual testing tools, Stephanie ensured the new Pike Road site meets strict accessibility guidelines. From screen-reader compatibility to proper color contrast and keyboard navigation, the new site ensures that every citizen has equal access to vital town information.
4. Built for Humans: Hands-On Training & Empowerment
A website is only as good as the team running it. When multiple people have editing access, content can quickly get disorganized. We designed this project to break that cycle by heavily investing in the people who manage it: Jennifer Grace Kendrick (Community Development Coordinator) and Vince Hodges (Communications Director), with active involvement from Mayor Gordon Stone.
We didn’t just hand over the keys at launch. We spent a full day in an intensive, hands-on training session with Vince, walking through every backend system. We remained highly responsive in the weeks following the launch, using every support request as an opportunity to slow down and teach.
The payoff was immediate. Recently, Vince reached out to us about a technical hurdle he ran into, worried he had broken something on the backend. Before our team could even pull up the site to investigate, Vince communicated back—he had already figured it out and fixed it himself.
“That is the power of a well-built WordPress and Elementor backend. It transforms town staff from dependent users into confident digital managers.” – Brian Harris
5. Long-Term Peace of Mind: The Dogwood Backup
Staff changes happen in local government, and software requires constant upkeep. To ensure Pike Road’s website stays as secure and beautiful five years from now as it is today, Dogwood stands right behind it.
- The Infrastructure: The site is hosted directly with Elementor, providing the fastest, most reliable, and most secure hosting environment specifically optimized for this build.
- The Maintenance Package: We handle daily backups, core theme and plugin updates, and all software licensing management.
- Content Support: We operate under a dedicated content contract, meaning we are always on standby to assist the town with complex updates, ensuring long-term design consistency.
The New Blueprint for Municipal Web Design
As the hometown of Dogwood’s owner, Brian Harris, the Town of Pike Road holds a special place in our hearts. We are incredibly proud to have partnered with Mayor Stone, the Town Council, Jennifer, and Vince to deliver a website that isn’t just an informational brochure, but a living, breathing community resource.
We firmly believe this site is the exact model that forward-thinking local governments should look to when upgrading their digital infrastructure.
Is Your Town’s Website Ready for an Upgrade?
If your current municipal website is hard for residents to navigate, frustrating for your staff to update, or falling behind on mobile responsiveness and ADA compliance, we would love to help.
Click here to schedule a free 15-minute municipal website audit with the Dogwood team.
We’ll review your current site and provide actionable feedback on how to turn it into your community’s greatest digital asset.
