Council approves city website redesign, beta site and agenda-management tool

The Agoura Hills City Council voted 5-0 Wednesday to proceed with a redesigned municipal website, a .gov domain conversion and evaluation of an integrated agenda-management platform (AgendaLink) to host agendas, meeting videos and attachments.

Communications Manager Mary Haddad presented a beta version of the site and said the project reduced the city’s website pages from about 480 to about 290 to consolidate outdated content and improve user experience: "We were able to reduce our website pages from about 480 pages down to 290 for the new website so about 40%" (transcript). Haddad showed a working homepage prototype with an emergency-notification pop-up, an accessible-language translation widget, an accessibility (ADA) tools menu, an improved search bar and a calendar that can be filtered by department or event type.

Nut graf: Council members praised the redesign as a major operational and transparency improvement. The plan includes staff training, a content migration workflow, an internal site-editing process and a target public launch in summer 2025. Haddad also recommended the city adopt AgendaLink (Cloud Driven Solutions) to integrate agendas, videos and attachments in a single interface; staff demonstrated external examples and said several nearby cities use the platform.

What the redesign includes

- Content consolidation: Staff reviewed departmental pages and migrated essential content; the site map reduced about 480 pages to roughly 290.

- .gov domain and email: Haddad said the city secured approval for a .gov domain and that .gov addresses will be merged with current email addresses so messages still arrive at the existing accounts during the transition.

- Accessibility and translation: The beta includes an accessibility widget with options for larger text, high contrast, dyslexia-friendly display and animation pauses, plus an auto-translate function that supports many languages.

- Agenda and video integration: Haddad presented AgendaLink as the preferred agenda-management vendor and showed how an embedded interface displays an agenda, time-stamped video and attachments together. Staff said AgendaLink has been used by other cities such as Brea, Buena Park, Costa Mesa and Lawndale and that Pegasus (the city’s streaming provider) can work with AgendaLink.

Council reaction and next steps

Council members praised the design and staff work. Council member Deborah Klein Lopez, who co-led the communications subcommittee, thanked Haddad and staff for streamlining content and improving searchability and transparency. Council members emphasized outreach plans, including demonstrations for senior residents and materials for the business community. Haddad said staff training has started, a quality-assurance review of migrated content is complete, and the city aims to launch the site in summer 2025.

Vote: Council member Deborah Klein Lopez moved to approve staff’s recommendation to proceed with the website redesign and related steps; Mayor Pro Tem Jeremy Wolf seconded. Roll call: Anderson—Aye; Anstead—Aye; Klein Lopez—Aye; Mayor Pro Tem Wolf—Aye; Mayor Sylvester—Aye. Motion passed 5-0.

Ending: Staff will continue content migration, finalize workflow and training, and return to council as needed before the public launch.