MENDOCINO CO., 11/9/26 — Type “dog license” into the search box on the county’s new website and the Dog Licenses page comes up first, with the date it was published and a line about what it covers.
On the old site, in September, a search for “board of supervisors agenda september 1 2026” returned 8,593 results. The first one was the agenda notice from Sept. 1, 2020.
“The thing that I’m most happy about is that the search function works,” Tony Rakes, the county’s information services director, told the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 1. “So the bar was not high on that one, but here we are.”
A weather widget that called a dead service
The old site dated to 2016. The county bought it from Vision Technology Solutions for $58,340, plus $8,000 a year. Granicus later took over the product.
By the end, the homepage weather widget pulled from a Yahoo service that shut down years ago, so it showed a degree sign next to “Fort Bragg” with no number. Nine COVID-19 pages were still up, along with a “Coronavirus Rumor Report” form. The “How Do I” menu offered links to apply for cannabis cultivation and report a lost pet. Both led to error pages.
Supervisor Ted Williams said at the Sept. 1 meeting that he could find “four or five different versions of a policy” and had to check the dates to guess which was current. Rakes said staff had gone through the files department by department and eliminated duplicates, drafts and what he called “chaff.”
The new site runs on Granicus’ OpenCities platform. The board approved the contract in October 2025 for $243,444 and added $15,852 in July for a new forms tool. That comes to $259,296 through June 2030. Rakes said in an email that the site has about 1,000 pages and about 8,000 documents.
The launch was set for Sept. 17. It slipped to Oct. 22. “We had identified a few areas of the site that were not quite up to our standards,” Rakes wrote, “and so made the decision to push the launch to address them.”
Clean pages and a search that works
In tests run for this story in late October and again this week, an accessibility checker called axe-core found no errors on 20 of 26 county pages. Google’s Lighthouse tool gave the homepage a perfect accessibility score. Every page tested has a “skip to main content” link for keyboard users, and every one of the 1,223 images the crawl found carries the alt tag that screen readers look for. The security setup earned the top grade, A+, from SSL Labs, an online security testing service.
The old site ran a tool called Lucky Orange that recorded visitors’ mouse movements and clicks on about 290 of 375 pages, and nothing on the site said so. The new site doesn’t run it. Its error page reads, “Looks like you got lost in the redwoods.”
Blank pages, dead links and scanned PDFs
The box where you type the squiggly letters on the county’s complaint forms has no label a screen reader can speak. Rakes said the forms were built on an old tool that’s no longer supported and will be rebuilt on a new one. “I don’t expect the forms to take long,” he wrote.
Forty-nine links on county pages still point to document addresses from the old site. All of them land on the lost-in-the-redwoods page.
About two dozen pages tell Google not to list them. One is the Behavioral Health page that lists free language help. Asked if that was on purpose, Rakes wrote, “Certainly not intentionally.”
The county’s own Americans with Disabilities Act transition plan, 985 pages, is a copier scan with no text a screen reader can read. A federal rule gives the county until April 26, 2027, to make its web pages and newer documents accessible. The old scans are mostly exempt.
“However,” Rakes wrote, “considering the irony of our ADA Transition Plan not being accessible, I will flag the items you mentioned for follow-up.”
A blue banner sits at the top of the site. It says, “Welcome to Our New Website! Please note some pages may have moved.”
That is an absolutely insane price to pay for a website.