Town of Amenia, New York
A resident-first municipal website that turns dense public information into clearer navigation, practical self-service and a distinct local identity.
The real problem was not “make it modern.” It was helping residents find things faster.
Amenia had the challenge common to municipal websites: many audiences, many departments and many completely different reasons for visiting. I went in planning around resident tasks rather than the town’s internal structure. Meetings, forms, permits, payments, news, events and other frequent needs needed to surface quickly, while deeper government content still had to remain organized and predictable. I also kept accessibility, responsive behavior and broad differences in digital confidence in mind, because a municipal site has to work for far more than one ideal user.
I used hierarchy and pathways to make a complicated website feel simple.
I led the custom UX/UI from information hierarchy through responsive design. Search, quick actions and high-value resident paths were treated as part of the core experience rather than decorative homepage modules. Visually, I wanted Amenia to feel specific to the community, but I deliberately kept navigation conventions familiar so personality never came at the cost of findability. The result was a site where the visual identity and the practical structure support each other.
It became more than a finished website. It became a reference direction.
The finished site gave residents clearer routes into everyday town services while giving Amenia a much more intentional digital presence. Later municipal clients repeatedly referenced Amenia when explaining the kind of direction they wanted, which was a useful signal that the balance was working. The project sharpened one of my strongest principles in public-sector design: clarity itself can be the visual idea.