City of Neenah Website Design

Website Design & Development

Client: City of Neenah, Wisconsin
Industry: Municipal Government & Public Sector
Platform: WordPress + Elementor Pro
Navigation: Audience-based mega menu, built in Elementor
Accessibility: Integrated ADA accessibility app
Scope: 40+ interior pages across 20+ city departments
Role: Website Designer & Developer, Stellar Blue Technologies
Year: Early 2023

City of Neenah Website Design

The City of Neenah, Wisconsin needed a new government website with a cleaner, easier experience. A municipal site has to serve just about everyone: residents looking for services, businesses navigating permits and development, and people trying to reach a specific department or office. The goal was a site that made all of that simple to find.

I took this project on while working with Stellar Blue Technologies. The homepage had already been designed when I stepped in, so my work was everything behind it: the full navigation, a reusable page system, and every interior page across the city’s many departments. It ended up being one of the largest builds I took on there, and I ran it solo.

The Challenge

This was a big, complex site with a lot of moving parts, and I inherited it mid-stream.

The project was handed off to me by the previous designer as he left, with the homepage designed but nearly everything else still to build
There were no moodboards, notes, or documentation left behind in the project management system, so I had to reverse-engineer the design direction myself
The site needed more than 40 interior pages built out across 20+ city departments, all of which had to be organized and made findable
A government site serves several very different audiences at once, so the navigation had to work for residents, businesses, and people looking for a specific department
Everything had to stay consistent and maintainable across dozens of pages built by one person on a deadline

Scope of Work

Once I took over, the work covered:

Reverse-engineering the design system the previous designer started, including tracking down his exact colors inside the existing files
Building the site’s full navigation and mega menu
Designing a reusable interior page template to keep 40+ pages consistent
Building out every interior page across the city’s departments and services
Making light refinements to the inherited homepage
Integrating an ADA accessibility app to support compliance

Tools Used:

I picked up a large, half-finished government site with no documentation and carried it all the way to launch, building the structure, the templates, and every interior page myself.

Taking Over the Project

Stepped in when the previous designer left mid-project, with only the homepage designed
Worked with no moodboards or notes, since none were left behind in the PM system
Reverse-engineered the design direction, digging through the existing files to find the exact colors he’d chosen so everything I built matched seamlessly

Navigation & the Mega Menu

Built the site’s mega menu in Elementor, organized around the three audiences a city serves
Structured everything into three clear entry points: Residents & Visitors, Business & Development, and Departments & Government
Organized more than 20 departments and dozens of services into a menu people could actually navigate, instead of a wall of links

A Scalable Page Template

Designed a reusable interior page template so 40+ pages stayed consistent and easy to maintain
Gave each section a left-hand sidebar for navigating within that section, with the page content on the right, so visitors never lost their place in a large site
Built the template to hold up no matter which department or service it was serving

Building Out 40+ Pages

Sifted through and organized the content for every department, then built each page out by hand
Kept a large, sprawling site coherent and on-brand across every single page
Did all of it solo, from structure to final page

Homepage & Accessibility

Made light refinements to the inherited homepage, combining a few elements while keeping the approved design largely intact
Integrated an ADA accessibility app so the site better served every resident, regardless of ability

Results & Impact

The finished site is the City of Neenah’s live government website, serving an entire community’s residents, businesses, and visitors across more than 40 pages and 20+ departments. It replaced a harder-to-use experience with clear, audience-based navigation and a consistent structure that the city can keep building on.

The part I’m proudest of isn’t a number. It’s that I inherited a massive, undocumented project mid-build and brought the whole thing home on my own, and you’d never know from using the site that it changed hands partway through.

Why This Project Matters

This is the project that proves I can handle scale and ambiguity at the same time. Taking over a large government build with no documentation, reverse-engineering the design, and then personally building 40+ pages into something clean and navigable is about as far from a simple brochure site as web work gets.

It was also one of my last projects at Stellar Blue, and a fitting one to go out on. A whole city’s website, organized so that anyone, resident, business owner, or someone just trying to reach the mayor’s office, can find what they need. That’s the kind of quietly useful work I care most about.