Modernizing a Municipal Website and Managing a .gov Migration

The Challenge

The Village of Montgomery website serves as an important source of information for residents. People use it to find meeting information, government documents, announcements, municipal services, community updates, and other public resources.

By 2024, the site needed another update. The goal was to give it both a newer appearance and reorganize the information so residents could find what they needed more easily. The site also needed to work with newer systems for public meetings, agendas, minutes, and official documents.

The following year brought a different challenge.

The Village, located in Orange County, NY, needed to migrate its website to an official .gov domain, but staff were not familiar with the application or migration process. Moving to .gov involved much more than registering a new web address. It required government authorization, technical preparation, accessibility review, redirect planning, security configuration, and coordination with other places where the Village’s web address appeared.

Just as important, the change needed to happen without breaking existing links or making it harder for residents to find information they already relied on.

Redesigning the Website Around Resident Needs

We redesigned the Village website in 2024 with a cleaner, responsive layout and a simpler way to organize municipal information.

Navigation and content were reorganized to make frequently requested information easier to locate, with clearer paths to departments, services, meeting materials, official documents, and community news.

The redesigned site also incorporated newer tools the Village was using to communicate with residents.

YouTube livestreams were integrated into the website for public meetings, and the site was connected with the Village’s system for managing agendas, minutes, and other government records.

The result was a website that brought several important sources of municipal information together in a more consistent and accessible way.

Planning the Move to .gov

When the Village asked for help moving to a .gov domain in 2025, the first step was determining what the process actually required.

We researched the federal application requirements, identified the information and approvals Village officials would need, and organized the work into a phased plan.

That included helping the Village prepare information such as its legal organization details, authorizing officials, requested domain, existing domains, technical contacts, and required Login.gov account.

This gave Village staff a clear path through a process they had not handled before.

While the domain request was being processed, we also began preparing the website for the eventual change.

Preparing the Website for the Transition

A domain migration can create problems if the old and new websites are not connected correctly.

Pages that residents have bookmarked can stop working. Search engines may continue sending people to old URLs. Links from outside websites can lead to errors. Internal links and documents may still reference the former address.

To avoid those problems, we created a page-level redirect plan so requests for pages on the former domain would lead visitors to the corresponding pages on the new .gov site.

We also reviewed the website against WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility expectations, including heading structure, image descriptions, color contrast, and the way linked documents were presented.

The preparation for the site migration also included considering how adoption of the .gov domain could affect Village email addresses and other public-facing communications.

Launching and Securing the New Domain

Once the .gov domain was approved, we handled the technical website migration.

The launch included:

• Connecting the new domain to the Village website
• Redirecting the former domains to the new address
• Installing and validating the SSL certificate
• Enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security
• Testing individual page redirects
• Updating references to the former domain
• Checking for broken links and other unexpected errors
• Supporting updates to public listings and directories

We also recommended ways for the Village to communicate the change to residents, including an official website notice and updates to social profiles and other public-facing materials.

The Village website continues to be hosted and maintained through DaleyPWS, with firewall protection, DDoS mitigation, off-server backups, SSL encryption, and ongoing technical support.

The Result

The Village successfully moved to villageofmontgomeryny.gov in December 2025.

The former web addresses continue to direct visitors to the appropriate content, allowing residents to use existing bookmarks and links while the new .gov address becomes established.

Combined with the 2024 redesign, the project gave the Village a more modern and accessible website, clearer access to public meetings and government records, and an official government domain backed by a carefully planned transition.

The project also reflects a relationship that has continued for more than 20 years. During that time, DaleyPWS has redesigned the Village’s primary website three times and supported several other municipal and community websites.

That history made a difference during the .gov transition. Because we already understood the Village’s website, content, hosting environment, and ongoing needs, we were able to take an unfamiliar requirement and guide the project from initial research through planning, approval, migration, and launch.

Related Services

SEO, Website Optimization & Migration Planning

Redesigns and domain changes can affect existing links and search visibility. We help plan site structure, redirects, internal linking, technical issues, and other details before a website transition begins.