Your crew answers every call.
Your website should too.

Almost certainly yes. In April 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice published a final rule under Title II of the ADA that sets a specific technical standard — WCAG 2.1 Level AA — for the web content and mobile apps of state and local government entities. Municipal fire departments and fire protection districts are covered. The compliance dates are staggered by size: public entities serving 50,000 or more people were required to comply by April 24, 2026, and smaller entities and special district governments by April 26, 2027. Most Illinois fire protection districts fall in that second group, which means the deadline is months away, not years. We are not your lawyers and you should confirm your own dates with counsel, but the direction is not ambiguous — and an accessibility audit is the cheapest way to find out where you actually stand.

It can cost nothing. Mainfolk, our own website platform, has a genuinely free plan — not a trial — that you can stay on forever with no credit card. It builds your starter site in about a minute and includes hosting, security and unlimited edits. If you later want the site on your own department domain instead of a mainfolk.com address, that is $15 a month, and the Civic tier for departments that want everything is $99 a month. Upgrading is never required, and if you ever cancel a paid plan your site keeps working on Free. Separately, if you need a custom build, a rescue of an existing site with years of content, a migration off a platform nobody supports anymore, or a permit or records workflow, Champlin Enterprises quotes that flat after one call — no hourly billing and no change orders, which makes it a number a board can vote on.

Actually free, with no end date and no card. The free plan gives you one website on a yourname.mainfolk.com address, an AI that builds your starter site in about a minute, hosting, security and unlimited edits, and a small "Made with Mainfolk" note in the footer. Departments that want their own domain and that note removed move to the $15 a month plan, but nothing forces you there — you can build the whole site, show it to your board or your chief, and decide later. If a paid plan ever stops making sense, you drop back to Free and the site keeps working.

More than departments expect, because the problems are usually invisible from the homepage. On a recent Illinois fire department site we took over, a page-by-page audit found a contact form that had been silently broken for an unknown length of time — the plugin had been deactivated, so the page printed raw code where the form should have been, and every resident who tried to write in got nothing. The photo gallery plugin was still installed but its database tables were gone, so that page displayed an error message. Every single page told Google it was "Just another WordPress site." No page had a heading structure a screen reader could navigate. Two of the links on the public fire safety resources page were dead, and one sent residents to a generic state homepage instead of the emergency management agency. None of that is visible unless somebody looks at every page. That is what the free audit is.

No. Rescues are the most common fire department project we do. Photos, incident history, personnel pages, meeting minutes, and your existing search rankings all come with you. On the department site above, the photo archive was orphaned — 506 images sitting on the server that the plugin could no longer display. We rebuilt the gallery to read those files directly and brought all of them back. Content that already exists is an asset. Losing it in a redesign is a choice, not a requirement.

That is the normal situation, and it is exactly why department sites drift. Two answers. On Mainfolk, editing is visual — you click the section you want to change on a live preview of your own site, edit it, and publish. No plugins, no theme updates, nothing to break. On a Care Plan, you do not update it at all: hosting, backups, security, updates, and uptime monitoring are ours, and when something needs to change you email one engineer. Either way the goal is the same — the site should not depend on one volunteer staying interested.

The things residents actually arrive looking for, which is a shorter list than most departments assume: how to reach you for non-emergency business without confusing it with 911, where your stations are, who runs the department, what apparatus you operate, burn permit and open burning rules, fire safety and public education resources, and how to join if you take paid-on-call or volunteer members. After that, the things that reduce phone calls: incident reports and records requests, hydrant and inspection information, station tour and school visit requests, and a calendar that gets used. Recruitment deserves special mention — for a lot of departments the website is the only recruiting tool that works while everyone is asleep.

Yes, and it is usually the highest-return page on the site. Paid-on-call and volunteer recruitment lives or dies on whether a curious 22-year-old can find out in ninety seconds what the commitment is, what the training involves, whether they get paid, and how to take the next step. Most department sites answer none of that. The same is true of public education — smoke detector programs, Vial of Life, home escape planning, and school visit requests are the pages that make a department useful to residents between emergencies, and they are the pages search engines and AI assistants pull answers from.

Yes. Flat quotes exist partly for this reason — a fixed number and a fixed scope is what a board can vote on. We can provide a written proposal, a scope document, and references, and we are used to timelines that move at the speed of a monthly meeting. If your district needs the work broken into phases so it fits a fiscal year, that is a normal request.

Because most of what goes wrong with a department website is engineering, not design. A deactivated plugin, a missing database table, a heading structure that fails accessibility, a broken redirect, a form that stopped delivering mail — none of those are fixed by a prettier template. Champlin Enterprises is an Illinois software company that builds SaaS platforms and AI systems in production. We also run Pulse, our own monitoring platform, across 180+ sites, which is how we know when something breaks before you do.