Resources > Designing Election Websites

Designing Election Websites

Design websites that help voters find, understand, and use elections information

Table of Contents

A well-designed website helps voters find answers to their most important questions, like how and when to vote, quickly and confidently. But you don’t need to be a web expert to make meaningful improvements. 

This guide shares actionable strategies, especially for small to mid-sized election offices, to make your website more accessible, trustworthy, and easy to maintain. 

Whether you’re building from scratch or updating an existing site, this resource offers research-backed recommendations that improve the voter experience.

The Center for Civic Design created this tool as part of the US Alliance for Election Excellence. 

What you’ll need

What you’ll need

  • Time to review your website structure and content
  • Staff responsible for website management and updates
  • Access to your content management system (CMS)
  • Basic understanding of your jurisdiction’s design standards
  • Support from IT or communications team
  • A download of the Designing Election Websites Guide
Getting started

Getting started

This guide is designed to help your office improve its website, whether you’re starting from scratch or making updates ahead of the next election.

Uses for this guide include recommendations and considerations for understanding your current website, identifying areas for improvement, and taking action to make your site more effective and accessible.

The toolkit will guide you through key steps to strengthen your website, including:

  • Reviewing your website structure and platform
  • Collaborating with IT and communications staff
  • Writing clear, voter-centered content
  • Improving navigation and design
  • Planning for maintenance and updates
Using the tool

Using the tool

This guide is part of our ongoing work to support election offices in making information accessible, trustworthy, and easy to maintain. It’s designed to help offices take meaningful steps toward improving their websites without technical knowledge.

Whether you’re updating a single page or planning a full site redesign, this guide can help you think through what voters need and how to deliver it clearly and effectively.

This guide is divided into 5 parts:

1. Foundations

This section walks through the basics of how your website works, how to collaborate with IT, and how to ensure your site is fast, secure, and well-structured.

2. Navigation

Covers how to organize your website so voters can quickly find what they need. Learn how to group related topics, use clear headings, and design intuitive menus.

3. Design and layout

Explore how visual consistency builds trust. This section offers practical tips for using fonts, colors, icons, and spacing effectively, and shows how to structure pages to highlight the most important content.

4. Content

Focuses on what voters are actually looking for. You’ll learn how to answer common voter questions, write out exact dates, provide physical location info, and create content that’s easy to find and use.

5. Maintenance and improvement

Good websites require updates. This section includes a pre-election checklist, advice on using voter questions to drive updates, and ideas for testing your website with real users.

Customizing for your office

Customizing for your office

Any tips for customizing this resource for my office?

This guide is tailored to small-medium jurisdictions, but the information is helpful for election offices of all sizes. Consider adapting the site structure depending on your jurisdiction size. For smaller offices, a single-page layout may be easier to maintain. Rural offices should consider load time and mobile access.

How do I know if this resource is helping?

Tracking voter questions over time is one way to know if your website has improved. Fewer calls or emails about basic information often signal success. Monitor analytics to see if users are finding key pages like voter registration and polling locations.

Which Standards of Excellence does this resource support?

  • Communications

Which Values of Excellence does this resource support? Why?

Values for the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence define our shared vision for the way election departments across the country can aspire to excellence. These values help us navigate the challenges of delivering successful elections and maintaining our healthy democracy.

Alliance values are nonpartisan and designed by local election officials, designers, technologists and other experts to support local election departments.

You may find this tool especially helpful for this Value:

  • Voter-centricity. The guide helps you design your website to focus on the questions and needs of real voters.
  • Comprehensive preparedness. Keeping content accurate and up-to-date prevents confusion before elections.

To learn more about the Values for Election Excellence, and to see the full list, visit the Alliance website.

Sharing feedback

Sharing Feedback

How was this resource developed?

The Center for Civic Design created this guide based on research on election websites conducted in 2023. For this research, CCD looked at the user experience and information design of 20 election websites in small-medium jurisdictions. You can read more about the research on CCD’s website.

How do I stay in touch? 

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