Project Notes:

We've been designing and developing the Bessemer City website since 1997 and it has undergone 4 site design changes, each building upon the previous. But for the 5th redesign and site development we wanted to take a different approach that would engage the community and visitors who visit the site feel as close to being in Bessemer City, North Carolina as possible through a web site.

To achieve this we felt the following site features where a must:

• A photo-gallery, with categories to help people drill down on photos they are interested in locating and viewing. The photos posted in the photo-gallery would push the latest photos posted into various sections of the web site based on category relation and also auto populate instant slide shows posted throughout the site.
• We also felt a calendar system was important to communicate to the community and site visitors the various activities and events happening within Bessemer city. Part of the calendar includes event listings for upcoming events, repeating events, this month, next month and previous month event listings and an event search engine. As with the photo-gallery, we developed the site to push the latest events posted to populate sections of the site based on relationship.
• Another feature we felt was important was the development of a document download page that pulls all documents uploads into one location and sorts the documents based on categories. This way no matter what site page a document is uploaded to, a site visitor can easily find all documents from one location.
• We also developed a news / blog where news, council meetings and agendas, and other important information that needs to be communicated can be posted. The news / blog also pushes information throughout the site based on category relation and there's a handy RSS feed for those who wish to subscribe to the news / blog. We also developed a search engine specifically for the news / blog to help site visitors location the information their looking for quickly by use of a keyword they wish to search.
• The previous sites had a good bit of content posted on pages that required a lot of scrolling. We decided to split many of the previous site page content into individual site pages to make it easier for site users to locate the specific information they were looking for based on the topic of discussion for the articles. This increased the site's total pages overall and opened up new opportunities to break sections of the site into more top level categories with sub-pages based on category relationship.

The feedback from the community has been outstanding and everyone in Bessemer City seem to be very pleased with the new site, it's ease of use and how well it represents the community.

Michael

Developed With: CMS Development, CMS Module Development, FormCrafter, HTML and CSS, Javascript, jQuery, MySQL, PageCraft CMS, Photoshop, PHP, SEO

Region: North Carolina, Gaston County, Bessemer City

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