The Municipal Website Venture offers a comprehensive service package designed to meet all your website requirements. In addition to the initial design and development, the package includes content transfer, hosting, training, consultation, website monitoring, support, and an easy-to-use Content Management System.
Partners of the MWV can expect their websites to perform in a manner that addresses key considerations, including usability, accessibility and search engine optimization. As such, partner websites are created to reflect a unique, consistently branded, professional look. Navigation and interactivity are designed to be intuitive and easy to use. By adhering to web standards, pages are constructed so that they download quickly and work properly in all mainstream browsers. In addition, they are accessible to other user agents, including cell phones, screen readers, search engines and other devices accessing the World Wide Web. Websites are designed to function properly even in non-optimal conditions: for example, when images, style sheets and JavaScript are turned off or unavailable. In other words, websites will still perform as intended but "degrade gracefully" even when some features/functionality have been disabled.
Website Methodology
Dedicated solely to producing websites for government organizations the municipal website coordinator follows several steps designed to create a plan that is logical, organized and focused on matters relevant to the interests of municipalities. Initially, the current website is thoroughly reviewed, analyzed and then evaluated. Based on available content and the way the branded image or visual identity is represented, a design in the form of a jpeg graphic and an organizational structure similar to a sitemap is proposed.
Once a final design and information architecture is approved, website development can begin. Included in the information architecture is the approach to navigation, graphical user interface elements and website features to be implemented. At one or more stages of development, a review process can be put in place to see that milestones are being met. Part of this process can include usability testing. This activity can be very instructive for pointing out problems or identifying improvements to the way a website works. In addition, a website review provides an opportunity for testing and Q/A — quality assurance.
Joomla - Content Management System
Websites are developed using the award-winning open-source content management system, Joomla. Powering many millions of websites, Joomla is widely recognized as one of the top content management systems in its class. Joomla has been developed in PHP and is optimized for the Linux / Apache Server environment integrated with a MySQL database. Among its strengths is its easy-to-use web-based administration application for managing websites. With thousands of developers collaborating, the standard set of core Joomla features are both robust and secure. Thousands of extensions add expanded website capabilities. In addition to this, its flexible architecture frees a designer to create any kind of layout that will meet your needs.
Web Hosting
The AMA manages its dedicated server. It is located in a secure Canadian data centre with daily and remote backups. The data centre has a 72-hour 750KW generator in case of unexpected outages, 4-8 simultaneous upstream connections, so network uptime is not an issue, and 340kvA of UPS Capacity. The data centre has air conditioning units/88 Tons of Capacity.
