Home to Michigan’s largest greenhouse growers, Michigan’s largest brewery, and several well-known, beautiful parks, suffice it to say that the Charter Township of Comstock in Kalamazoo County is a unique township. Since a website serves as the face of a township, the Comstock Board knew that they needed a website that captured what makes Comstock special. Unfortunately, their website at the time made heavy use of stock photos that didn’t show off the actual township. Their previous website provider didn’t give them much input on the design, and it showed in the lack of representation of the township’s unique character.
In addition to the lack of personality on the site, the Comstock Board was dissatisfied with the site’s navigation. With important information scattered between the main menu, an assortment of dropdown menus in the middle of the page, and a list of links at the very bottom, it was far too difficult for visitors to find what they were looking for. Worst of all, Comstock wasn’t getting the support they needed for their website provider to resolve any of these issues.
We met the Comstock team at the 2019 Michigan Townships Association Expo when they attended our Website Wish List presentation. When Comstock informed us of the issues with their website at the time, the Shumaker Technology Group graphic design team got to work on several new homepage design mockups. We made sure to simplify the previously-complex navigation structure, using just a main menu plus a set of convenient quick links, all “above the fold” (the part of a website you can see on a website without scrolling down). Comstock especially liked one of those designs for how user-friendly it looked while also conveying Comstock’s unique attributes. STG and Comstock worked together over the coming weeks to refine the design into something both parties were 100% satisfied with.
STG’s development team then built the actual website based on the final design mockups, importing relevant content from Comstock’s previous website, while helping to guide Comstock through the process of creating new content. When everything was in place, it was time to officially launch the new website, which you can view here: https://comstockmi.gov/
Thank you for your team’s hard work on our website!! We have been getting a lot of compliments!!
–Nicole Shook, Election Specialist/FOIA Coordinator
The Shumaker Group continues to manage the Comstock website, adding things like announcements and calendar events and making any changes as requested by the Comstock team.
