Websites & Digital Presence

Your social media accounts may carry the daily news, but your website is still the department's digital home. Here are ten reasons it may not be doing its job.

If your homepage does not tell a visitor how to join and why it matters within the first few seconds, you have already lost a candidate you never knew you had.

A battalion chief saw one of the earliest fire department websites and asked for something new. A few hours after saying no, Dave sent the first concept for what became Firehouse.com.

The Department of Justice finalized a rule requiring state and local governments, including special districts like fire departments, to make their websites and apps accessible. Here is what the rule actually says.

A dead link or a two-year-old event is not really a technical problem. It is proof that nobody was ever assigned to own it.

A public safety or local government website is not a brochure. It is infrastructure. Here is what it owes the people who depend on it.

Most residents will never open your website on a desktop. If your site was designed for one anyway, you built it for a visitor who mostly does not exist.

A resident who cannot find a budget, a board agenda or a working phone number does not assume the information is private. They assume the organization has something to hide.