City of Princeton – WV
Introduction
City Branding
Municipal Website
Municipal Forms
Comprehensive Plan
Photography
The City of Princeton, WV, sought a modern and inclusive online presence that could better engage residents, businesses, and visitors alike. Historically known for its community-driven activities and small-town charm, Princeton needed a website where citizens could quickly find essential services, event information, and municipal resources.
Our team at Starry Eyes approached this project by first understanding Princeton’s identity, culture, and specific pain points. We wanted to create a welcoming digital space that reflected the City’s friendly ethos while meeting rigorous accessibility standards.
Because the primary audience includes local residents, business owners, and potential visitors, we ensured the design would remain intuitive and visually appealing across devices. Additionally, we produced a high-quality vectorized copy of the City’s seal and defined typography and a color palette for the City’s branding elements.
Through close collaboration with city officials, we established clear content goals, outlined the site’s essential features, and set the foundation for a sustainable online platform that can grow alongside Princeton’s evolving needs. The result is a user-friendly website that seamlessly highlights local events, announcements, and community resources—all while maintaining a professional, approachable tone.
Problems We Solved
Branding & Photography
Over the years since its inception, the original design file for Princeton’s City Seal became lost. One of the first things we did was digitally retrace the seal in a vector format so that it could be reused and resized without worry of distortion/pixelization. Another part of the branding step was to establish a color palette and typography standards so that the website could have a consistent theme and feel. Another secret ingredient to a stunning website is excellent photography. Throughout the development of the website, the Starry Eyes team attended local events and visited iconic areas within the city of Princeton, WV. This gave us great visuals for the new website and the other projects we worked with the City on, like their Comprehensive Ten-Year Plan.Website Development
Before our redesign, Princeton’s online presence was scattered and outdated. Key issues included difficult site navigation, limited mobile responsiveness, and a lack of clear accessibility considerations. Residents often struggled to locate forms for permits or event details, leading to frustration and increased phone inquiries at City Hall. We also found that the existing website had minimal alt text for images and inadequate color contrast, posing significant challenges for users with visual impairments. This redesign project presented an opportunity for the City to demonstrate its commitment to inclusivity. The City Manager, Mike Webb, was particularly upset with their current site’s visual appeal. Developed by an out-of-state website agency, the City’s current website lacked the clean and modern look of other websites the outside company developed. Specifically, the images and overall theming on the old site felt cheap, dated, and not up to snuff with the evolving and fun municipality it represented. To solve these issues, we focused on reorganizing the site structure into logical categories—such as “City Services,” “Events & Announcements,” and “Contact & Forms.” Another large part of the solution was creating custom content types for things like “Departments,” “Parks,” “City Council,” and “Agendas.” These custom content types not only helped us to better organize info for front-end users like citizens, but also made it easier for website administrators to quickly post information in an organized manner. Additionally, we integrated a clear navigation menu at the top of each page, ensuring easy keyboard accessibility. Each new page and image was carefully evaluated for alt text and color contrast compliance, ensuring Princeton’s local government met or exceeded WCAG 2.1 AA. We also implemented a responsive website theme that automatically adapts to different screen sizes so users on mobile devices can seamlessly access the information they need. This approach not only addressed immediate accessibility requirements but also laid the groundwork for continuous improvements in user experience.Website Maintenance & Hosting
Though we developed a customized and simple backend interface for City administrators to use for easy website updates, the City elected to keep Starry Eyes Media on retainer to provide top-tier hosting and website management services. This step freed City officials and coordinators from worrying about website updates. These days, our contacts within the City of Princeton simply send us a list of updates, and we quickly take care of them. Through our fully-managed hosting services, we also continuously monitor the website to ensure that it runs as smoothly as the City does itself.Key Highlights
- Streamlined Navigation: A clear menu structure guides users based on their needs (citizens, businesses, or visitors/tourists), minimizing confusion and search time.
- Transparent Government Operations: Comprehensive and exhaustive list of municipal departments and department heads accompanied by a general overview of how the departments operate and accountability measures.
- Community Calendar: The City can easily post and manage upcoming events, so residents never miss out on local happenings.
- WCAG-Focused Accessibility: We integrated alt text, high-contrast color schemes, and keyboard-friendly components, pushing the site toward AAA compliance where feasible.
- Responsive Design: The site automatically adjusts to desktop, tablet, and mobile, ensuring an optimal viewing experience across all devices.
- User-Friendly Forms: Enhanced forms allow residents to submit requests online, increasing convenience and reducing paperwork for city staff.
Results & Impact
H1: Creative Services. Stellar Possibilities
Since 2015, we’ve provided local gov, nonprofits, and businesses our high-end solutions for website, branding, and graphic design needs. Are you ready to launch?
- Website Development: We offer full-service website solutions including planning, designing, domain management, hosting, and site updates. Want to learn more? Jump to our web development services page.
- Brand Development: We connect brands to audiences through research and strategy to design logos and comprehensive visual identities.
- Print Design: From government forms and comprehensive plans to restaurant menus and magazines, we take print projects from idea to in-hand.
H2: Full-Service Website Solutions
Starry Eyes Media offers government agencies, nonprofits, and businesses full-service website solutions. Our comprehensive process includes planning, designing, domain management, hosting, and site management to keep live websites fresh.
Whether you need a website for a new brand or if you already have a website needing to be refreshed or migrated to a new platform, contact Starry Eyes to discuss the best approach. Put our experience, thoroughness, and dedication to quality to work for you.
H3: Ongoing Support & Resources for Your Organization
We proactively monitor your domain for potential threats and vulnerabilities, safeguarding it against unauthorized access and cyberattacks.
Would you prefer having us host, maintain, and manage your site once it’s launched so you never have to touch it yourself? Check out our Website Management services for info on how we provide a total website solution.
H4: Website Refreshes & Overhauls
Do you already have a website, but it needs updating? We have experience accessing existing sites and updating technology and content, as well as migrating existing content from non-WordPress platforms.
If your website needs to be moved from your current server to another server, we can help you navigate the various considerations and do the heavy lifting to get your site situated in a new hosting environment, whether it's on our server or another.Plus, to save you from being in the middle of two web companies' technical conversations, we will deal directly with any other web company you've been using or will be using. Easy peasy.
Contact us so we can start evaluating your current site and provide you with an estimate.
H5: Webmaster Services for Ongoing Website Management
We offer fully managed WordPress hosting, which means we take care of all of your website's maintenance and support needs. Whether we're building your new site or you'd like us to refresh and revitalize your existing one, we can keep it running perfectly.
Choosing a managed hosting solution like ours also means that you don’t have to worry about taking care of the many website software updates. Often, various updates for WordPress core, WooCommerce, and other plugins are released many times each month. Sometimes, these updates aren’t compatible and can negatively impact or crash a website. We take the time to test software updates before implementing them on our network. If something does happen to go wrong, we’ll already know about it and be able to take care of any issue right away.
When it comes to updating the content and products on your website, you have the option to keep us on-call to help or your team can be in charge of maintenance. Starting with our Fermion-level Premium Managed Hosting plan, we provide dedicated support for update requests. Need to update your store hours? Done. Need a new page with product specifications? We’ve got you. All you have to do is submit a support ticket with the details and attach any relevant files, and we’ll make sure your site is updated within 48 to 72 hours*.
H6: Ready to Stop Worrying About Your Website? Get in Touch Today!
Stop worrying about keeping your website updated and running smoothly. Contact us today for a no-cost consultation. For more details, visit our Website Management Services Page.
If you’re in the active stage of planning your website or branding project and would like some professional input before you get ahead of yourself, let’s have a chat.