Kearney Township’s New Website

When we met Kearney Township at the Michigan Townships Association Expo in 2019, they were just starting to look into updating their website. The previous Kearney Township website hadn’t been updated in many years. It wasn’t mobile-friendly, it lacked modern security features, and it simply looked old, providing a less-than-flattering online persona for the township.

Kearney website homepage Kearney wasn’t able to immediately focus on the website project, but we made sure to stay in contact. Once they were ready, the Shumaker Group submitted a proposal right away. The Kearney Board discussed their options, and they accepted our proposal. Then, we hit the ground running working together on the new website!

Kearney had wanted to include zoning maps on their website for a … Read More

Bringing Comstock Township’s Uniqueness to the Web

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.

comstock website
Comstock Charter Township’s new website, developed by STG

In addition to the lack of personality on the site, the Comstock Read More

Web Basics – Updated Content

Having up to date content on your website is potentially one of the most important things you can do as a small business or municipality. Think about it, why do you have a website? If you’re a business you want your website to be informative and act as an instrumental marketing tool. You want your website to tell a story about your business and bring in customers. As a municipality you want to provide as much relevant information as possible about your local government. You want to make sure that your residents, tourists, prospective residents, and businesses looking to invest in your area are able to find what they need easily. So what content should you put on your site?… Read More

Web Basics – ADA Accessibility

Happy Wednesday everyone.   Today in Web Basics we’re going to talk about the Americans with Disabilities Act and how it pertains to your website.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is a civil rights law that was enacted in 1990 to prohibit any discrimination on the basis of disability.  Discrimination includes affirmative acts of discrimination (adverse treatment compared to the non-disabled) and failure to provide equal opportunity.  Although the letter of the law does not specifically mention websites, interpretations of the law are overwhelmingly supporting that websites must be accessible to people with disabilities.

So to understand how we can make our sites more accessible to the disabled we first need to understand how a disability might affect one’s ability to … Read More

Web Basics – Security

Hi everyone. Welcome to our second post in the Web Basics series. Today we’ll be talking about website security; why it’s important and how to improve it. Let’s dive in.

If you’ve picked up a newspaper in the last 5 years you’re probably aware of the fact that digital security is a real hot-button issue right now. From local and federal governments to businesses and some of our most trusted institutions, no one is totally immune to breaches in digital security. As more and more of our personal and organizational information becomes digitally available, it becomes more susceptible to falling into the wrong hands. If your website is hacked, customer and company data may be stolen, payments can be redirected … Read More