Marcus pulled up Broward County’s digital front door, its main website, at 9 p.m., hunting for his evacuation zone before a tropical storm wobbled south. Four menus later, he landed on a PDF from 2019 with no answer. That kind of frustration used to be ordinary in Broward County, Florida. It isn’t anymore.
This month, the county finished the rebuild, the website more than 2 million residents use for county services. Four people built it, with an AI assistant doing much of the heavy lifting. GovTech reported on the project October 6, worth knowing if you’ve ever cursed at a government website.
A Website With 10,000 Pages and No Clear Way Through
Broward’s old site ran on SharePoint technology about 15 years old. Roughly 250 county employees had become web authors over time, each adding pages for their own department. The result: more than 10,000 pages across hundreds of agency sites, pointing nowhere in particular. Need a permit form or a shelter address? You were on your own in a maze nobody designed on purpose.
Four People, One AI Assistant, Six Months
Digital government manager Peter Perez led a four-person team through the rebuild. They moved the site to Sitecore, a cloud-based content system, and used Claude, an AI assistant, to make sense of the new platform and catch bugs in code the team wrote by hand. Rather than migrate all 10,000 pages, they built “skinny sites,” single focused pages per agency with the documents people actually need. By late September, about 90 percent of county websites ran on the new system.
“What’s really remarkable is that Peter’s team is only four people deep,” said Domenic DiLullo, Broward County’s CIO.
Outside firms hired for similar overhauls often charge seven figures and take years. Broward finished phase one in six months with four staffers, keeping real money in the county budget.
Why Broward County’s Digital Front Door Matters for Residents
Perez set a simple goal: get residents an answer within 30 seconds. Picture a retired nurse hunting for her property tax exemption deadline at midnight, or a restaurant owner named Priya searching for a permit form before an inspection. The old site could burn ten minutes on that same search. Thirty seconds instead matters most during someone’s only free hour before picking up the kids.
- Fewer clicks between a search and an answer, especially useful during hurricane season when minutes count.
- Pages built for multiple languages, so residents who don’t read English first aren’t stuck guessing.
- One clean page per agency instead of a hunt across departments that don’t talk to each other.
Broward isn’t alone here. Counties nationwide want faster service without budgets that grow to match. A Maryland counties conference session this summer described the same goal. Broward just showed what it looks like in practice.
It’s Not Finished, and That’s Kind of the Point
The new site has only been live about six weeks, so Broward lacks hard numbers yet on time saved. The county expects a clearer picture by spring. Phase two, moving the employee intranet off SharePoint, is still ahead. It fits a wider pattern of small teams doing more with less, like Poughkeepsie’s pothole-reporting app or Emanuel County’s emergency alerts.
If you live in Broward County, try this: next time a storm warning, a tax deadline, or a permit renewal sends you to broward.org, time yourself. If your own town wants the same fix without writing a seven-figure check to a consulting firm, the lesson isn’t about the software. It’s about trusting a small team, a clear deadline, and AI used as a helper instead of a replacement.