About this concept: “Civic Clarity”

Why we built it this way

People come to a planning commission’s site with an errand: find the next meeting, comment on a project, take waste somewhere on Saturday, get the agenda before the board meets, check whether a county’s hazard mitigation plan is current. So the home page says what GHRPC does for the 11 counties, puts a search box for plans, agendas, minutes and notices right under that, then opens three doors (local officials, businesses, residents) that lead to real tasks rather than a list of departments.

The look follows public-sector design systems that have been tested with millions of people, GOV.UK and the U.S. Web Design System: one column of readable text, a strong heading scale, big touch targets, and a yellow focus state you can’t miss. The color is Green Hills green rather than federal blue, on a warm paper-white background, so it reads as a regional office in north Missouri, not a federal agency. The header carries the GHRPC lettermark from the commission’s current logo, with the full name set as text so it stays readable on a phone. Typography does the work, so there is one photograph on the whole site.

The pages

• Home: what GHRPC does, a search across every record in this concept, tasks by audience, what’s happening, and the latest board day.
• Meetings, agendas and minutes: every meeting posted on ghrpc.org for the RPC Board, the Solid Waste District, the TAC, the Multimodal Subcommittee and the Finance Committee, grouped by body, each with a clear agenda and minutes status. Filter by body.
• Public comment: the open Chillicothe environmental review, how to comment today, and the comment-online pattern.
• Documents and archive: search and filter plans, agendas, minutes, reports, newsletters, notices and forms.
• Hazard mitigation plans by county: the data page, with a map, a summary, a sortable table and a plan shown with its summary.
• Transportation planning: a program page.
• This page.

What it is not

• It is not the official GHRPC website and is not affiliated with the commission. The real site is ghrpc.org.
• It is not the finished information architecture. The structure is a proposal to discuss in the discovery sessions, not a decision already made.
• It is not a full content migration. Seven pages are built; solid waste, economic development, emergency planning, floodplain, CDBG, code enforcement and E-911 would follow the same patterns.
• No documents are hosted here. Each record gives its title and dates as published on ghrpc.org and links to the original post.
• The search covers this concept’s records only: every meeting, document and notice used on these pages, not all of ghrpc.org.
• The public comment form sends nothing. Its fields have no names, it has nowhere to send to, and a notice beside it says so.

How it was made

Every fact, date, name and figure on these pages was taken from public content on ghrpc.org, captured on 22 September 2026. Nothing was invented. Where ghrpc.org is silent, the page says so rather than filling the gap: “Minutes not yet posted”, “Closing date: not stated on ghrpc.org”, and a labeled slot where the live site would show the next meeting.

• The county map on the hazard mitigation page uses real county boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau (TIGERweb, 2026), converted from GeoJSON and drawn in the page as SVG. On the live site, GHRPC’s own ArcGIS Pro exports would replace them and be drawn the same way, with no embedded map service.
• The document library is a sample: the records used across this concept, not the complete archive.
• Slots marked “Slot” show where the live site puts something that ghrpc.org doesn’t publish today, such as a comment closing date.

The pages are plain HTML and CSS with a system font stack, and two small scripts that only add to pages that already work without them: the phone menu, table sorting, the meetings filter and the search. There is no third-party code, font, tracker or embed. The one photograph is GHRPC’s own, of its office in Trenton.

This concept is built on Nanopage, an AI-assisted site platform that our CTO, Jasmin Ihtijarevic, is involved in building. It’s one of three platforms in our proposal, at the same price. The same design can be built on WordPress or a purpose-built CMS.

How we handle maps, documents, meetings and data

GHRPC asked for maps, documents, data tables and spreadsheets to appear as a page rather than as a link to a PDF. The hazard mitigation page shows that pattern: a map, a summary, a sortable HTML table and a document with a plain-language summary, all on one page and all built from one list that staff edit once.

• Maps. Amanda George’s ArcGIS Pro layers are exported as GeoJSON and drawn in the page. They stay searchable, printable, described for screen readers and fast on a rural connection, with no dependency on an outside map service. Status is shown by pattern and label as well as color.
• Data and Excel. A spreadsheet becomes a real HTML table with proper row and column headers, sortable in the browser, with the original file attached for anyone who wants it.
• Documents. Each one is a record with a title, date, type, program and summary. The library, the search and the program pages build themselves from those records, so nothing is linked by hand twice and nothing goes stale when a file is replaced or retired.
• Meetings. One form per meeting; minutes are added to the same record later. Every record shows plainly whether its agenda and minutes are posted.
• Search. One index, built from the same records as the pages, drives the home-page search and the library filters. On the live site it’s rebuilt each time staff publish.
• Accessibility. WCAG 2.1 AA is a build requirement, not a review step: one h1 per page, logical headings, a skip link, visible focus, real table headers, labeled form fields, alt text, keyboard-usable menus and controls, print styles for meetings and data, and respect for reduced-motion settings. Every page is checked with axe-core before it’s published.