A rider-first website concept for Cherriots / Salem Area Mass Transit District. Interactive prototype: arrivals, vehicle positions and alerts are simulated stand-ins for live GTFS-Realtime and Avail feeds.
Choose a language
Rider information, alerts and schedules are translated. Real-time arrival data stays numeric so it never mistranslates.
Text size
Display
Preferences persist across pages. The interface also honours your operating system’s reduced-motion and contrast settings automatically.
How we would deliver it
The screens in this demo were built the same way the real site would be: templates first, live data second, accessibility checked at every step rather than audited at the end. Below is the sequence we would follow, what Cherriots owns at each stage, and what the whole thing costs across the contract term.
Every phase ends with something Cherriots can look at and sign off, not a status report. Nothing moves forward on the strength of a document alone.
We start with riders and with the data, not with a sitemap. That means ride-alongs and intercept interviews at Courthouse Square, sessions with dispatch and customer service, and a full inventory of what is actually in your GTFS, GTFS-Realtime and Avail feeds before anyone designs a screen that depends on them.
You get
Information architecture, then wireframes, then the template set. We design the fifteen reusable templates rather than page-by-page comps, because that is what staff will actually work with after launch. Cherriots brand colours and Open Sans throughout, with contrast measured rather than assumed.
You get
WordPress, built as a template system. Fifteen page templates assembled from a shared library of blocks, so a new service page or board meeting page is a matter of choosing a template and filling fields. No page builder sprawl, no one-off layouts that only the agency can maintain.
You get
Migration is where transit sites usually lose their public records. We map every existing URL, migrate the content that survived the audit, and put a redirect behind everything else so that a decade of links from Salem Reporter, the city and the FTA keep resolving.
You get
This is the part that makes it a transit site rather than a brochure. Static GTFS drives routes, stops and timetables. GTFS-Realtime drives arrivals and vehicle positions. Avail drives the alerts, so what a rider reads is what dispatch published, with nobody retyping it into WordPress.
You get
Automated scanning catches roughly a third of accessibility defects. The rest need a person and a screen reader, so that is what we use. Testing runs against the templates, which means a fix applies everywhere that template is used rather than on one page.
You get
We do not hand over a login and leave. Staff are trained on the templates they will actually use, we stay on hypercare through the first service change, and the documentation lives in the site rather than in a PDF nobody reopens.
You get
Year one is a fixed price for the whole build. From year two the fee covers managed hosting, maintenance, security and support, escalating five percent a year so the cost is predictable for the full term.
| Contract year | Scope | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | Discovery, UX/UI, development, migration, integrations, testing, launch | $105,000 |
| Year 2 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support | $18,000 |
| Year 3 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support +5% | $18,900 |
| Year 4 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support +5% | $19,845 |
| Year 5 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support +5% | $20,837 |
| 5 year evaluated total | $182,582 | |
| Year 6 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support +5% | $21,879 |
| Year 7 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support +5% | $22,973 |
| Year 8 | Hosting, maintenance, security & support +5% | $24,122 |
| Potential 8 year total | $251,556 |
Years 6 to 8 are shown for planning only. They apply if Cherriots exercises the optional renewal terms.
The annual fee from year two is not a retainer against hours. It is a defined scope, and everything below is inside it. Third-party software and licensing are covered in our fee, so there is no separate line item to budget for.
Infrastructure located and supported in the United States, sized for service-disruption traffic spikes.
Contractual availability target with monitoring and alerting behind it.
Issued, installed and renewed automatically. No expiry surprises.
Automated, off-site and restore-tested, not just taken.
Updates applied on a staging environment first, then promoted.
Continuous monitoring with response, including out of hours.
Regular scans of core, plugins and dependencies, with remediation.
Named contacts, defined response times, no ticket lottery.
We find and fix these rather than waiting for a rider to report them.
GTFS, GTFS-Realtime and Avail connections kept working as those systems change.
Escalation path for anything that takes rider information offline.
Regular reporting on uptime, performance, security posture and site activity.
We arrange the test, manage the vendor and remediate the findings.
Included in our fee rather than passed through to Cherriots.
None of these are required for the site to launch or to run well. They are here so the costs are known now rather than quoted later, and Cherriots can add them at any point in the term.
Structuring content and schema so that AI assistants and answer engines return correct Cherriots service information rather than a guess. Increasingly this is how riders ask when a bus runs.
Editorial strategy, keyword and content planning, and ongoing optimization work. Separate from the technical SEO already included in Phase I, which covers the structural side at no extra cost.
Beyond page views: which routes riders look up, where trip plans fail, which alerts get read, and what that says about where service information needs to improve.
Extra sessions beyond the training included at launch, for new staff or for a team that wants a refresher after a service change.
In-person sessions in Salem, useful when several teams need to be in the same room. Travel is reimbursed separately at cost.
The five rider screens in this demo are clickable. The walkthrough explains what to look at on each one and which requirement it answers.