East Michigan Council of Governments

Overview

The East Michigan Council of Governments (EMCOG) is the regional planning agency for fourteen counties in east central Michigan, from the Saginaw Bay shoreline to the Thumb, together with the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. It carries the region's economic development strategy, transportation programming, hazard mitigation and planning services, food systems work and regional data. Its website is where member counties, townships and the public find the plans, meeting records and reports that work produces.

The Challenge

EMCOG's old site was a classic-ASP application on a server run by an outgoing provider, which was being switched off. Hundreds of documents (strategies, plans, agendas, minutes and reports) lived only on that server, the Internet Archive held only downscaled copies of some of them, and Google had indexed the old .asp addresses. As a public body, the new site also had to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility under ADA Title II.

Our Solution

We pulled the content straight from the old origin ahead of its planned shutdown: 558 files, including 515 of the 517 documents the old pages linked to, plus documents from the provider's export that no page had linked. We rebuilt the site in Astro, generating the county profiles, document archive and meeting pages from the recovered data, and wrote a CloudFront function that handles 301 redirects for old site URLs, with key pages mapped to their new homes. Accessibility is checked twice: a markup check runs inside every build, and an axe-core audit walks every page in both color schemes.

Key Features

Results