Districts buy a website about once a decade, usually under a deadline, usually without a procurement specialist in the room. The vendors they end up talking to mostly sell to cities, and a city's requirements document and a CAD's are not the same document.
This is the framework we would want a district to hold us to. It names no vendors, ours included.
1. Statutory coverage
Generic government website vendors treat Texas Tax Code obligations as content you write. Ask instead what the product does about them.
- How does the platform satisfy § 25.01(d)'s weekly appraisal record posting? Specifically: does it update from data, or does somebody upload a file every week?
- Where does the confidentiality filter run, and can you audit it afterward?
- Does anything in the product surface owner age or over-65 exemption status, which § 25.027 prohibits posting?
- Can the chief appraiser see when records last refreshed without asking for help?
- If a week gets missed, is there a record of it?
The tell
If the answer to the first one is "your staff uploads it," the vendor has handed a statutory duty back to you as a recurring chore with a consequence attached to forgetting it. That may still be an acceptable trade. Just make it a decision you took, not one you find out about later.
2. Accessibility, properly scoped
Every vendor says they are WCAG compliant. The useful questions are narrower.
- Does accessibility hold at the template layer, or does it depend on what editors do inside a page?
- What happens to a scanned PDF agenda? The right answer is "nothing, that is a document problem." Be suspicious of anything else.
- Which ADA Title II deadline do they think applies to you, and do they know the dates moved in April 2026?
- Are third party embeds, the property search portal above all, inside or outside their accessibility claim?
That last one matters more than it sounds. Most CAD accessibility complaints involve a document or an embedded portal, and both usually sit outside the website vendor's scope.
3. Backups and recovery
Push for numbers here. Vendors will give you adjectives if you let them.
- How often, and where do the copies live?
- Can the vendor delete the backups? Can you, by accident?
- How far back does recovery reach? Last night is not a retention policy.
- Can your district be restored on its own, or does a restore involve other districts on the platform?
- If your site gets deleted, is there a recovery window, and can anyone shorten it?
Almost nobody asks the last one, and it is the one that matters in the scenario that actually destroys a small agency's data: an authorized account doing an authorized thing.
4. Tenant isolation, if the platform is shared
- Is isolation enforced by the application, or by convention?
- Can one district's credentials reach another district's records, files, or media library?
- Does your domain ever serve another district's content?
- Are pre-launch sites discoverable, and are they blocked from search engines?
5. Content ownership and exit
Questions for before you sign, not during a dispute.
- If the district leaves, what does it get, and in what format?
- Does the district own its content outright?
- Is parcel or tax data ingested into the vendor's system, or linked from your existing system of record? Ingested data is data you now maintain in two places under two sets of rules.
- Can you export without a support ticket and a negotiation?
6. Who actually operates it
Most CAD website failures are not technical. The site was built well, the person who knew how to update it left, and three years later the board page lists two people who retired.
- Can a staff member with no web skills add a notice unaided on their first day?
- What happens when the trained person leaves?
- Is the training documentation inside the product, or a PDF from onboarding that nobody can find?
- Does updating a board member's title mean editing it in more than one place?
That last question predicts better than anything else whether a district's site will still be accurate in year three. If the same fact lives in four pages, it will be wrong in at least two of them.
7. Cost questions worth asking early
- What does migration cost, and is it fixed or hourly?
- What does a design change cost after launch?
- Is accessibility remediation of existing documents included, quoted separately, or out of scope?
- What happens to pricing at renewal?
Where we land on our own list
Valorem AI answers some of these well and others are not our scope. Document remediation is a separate engagement. The § 26.17 database is normally your CAMA vendor's, and we link to it rather than replace it. We would rather field all of these than have you find out after signing.
Our answers are on the platform, security, and compliance sections.