City of Silvermere

A resident with a barking dog, a tax question or a building permit does not know which department owns it, and should not have to. A site organized by department pushes that sorting back onto the front counter, one phone call at a time. Silvermere starts from the resident's end. The homepage leads with pay a bill, report an issue and find a service, then the five things people come for and the questions City Hall hears most.

The everyday tasks each got a working tool. Every example issue on the request hub links into the form with the category already chosen, so a report reaches the right queue the first time. Search puts the task ahead of the pages, so typing "dog licence" returns the licence action first. The garbage day lookup covers five collection zones, moves pickups for BC statutory holidays and downloads a year of dates to a resident's calendar.

The signature move is Emergency Mode. On the worst night of a fire season, the communications officer throws one switch. An alert takes over the top of every page, served so it shows even if scripts fail. Emergency moves into the main menu, photos and maps drop away so pages stay light under load, and the emergency page goes to the top of search. Once visited, that page keeps working offline, because the resident who needs it may be on a highway shoulder with no signal.

Council and records sit where residents can find them. Meeting pages, agendas, the budget, reports, policies, FOI and 53 bylaw pages are one menu away, and the next meeting date is worked out around statutory holidays. Events and council dates feed a calendar subscription, so nothing on the site presents last season as upcoming. A support hub puts crisis lines first, then help arranged by situation: housing, mental health, newcomers, seniors and family violence.

The site grades itself in public. A site-health page publishes dated Lighthouse results for ten page templates on phone and desktop, and every template scored 100 for accessibility in the August 11, 2026 scan. The same page says what that score cannot prove, since automated tools catch only part of WCAG and the rest needs a person. The site is built toward WCAG 2.2 AA, with text size controls, a dark theme and a translate menu in the header.

For a real municipality, the question is who keeps it current. A working prototype, shown in person, pairs this front end with a content system that department staff run. Authors draft, an approver publishes or schedules, and an alert published there reaches every page of the site in seconds. Silvermere is labelled as a concept on every page, with invented people, bylaws and phone numbers, so the patterns can be tested without being mistaken for a real city.