The Client
The website for the city of Staunton, Virgina.
The Challenge
Staunton came to us with what is a common scenario for many older, first-generation sites: a home page in disarray and a cobbled together navigational strategy. Staunton's IT manager chose the Plone CMS to make the site more current, functional and user-friendly. After the initial installation, he sought our help to develop themeing that would inform and engage the tourist audience as well as meet the needs of Staunton's citizens.
The Process
We met with the IT department and the city's website development committee to determine design direction and site structure. Along with theme development, a new approach was needed to streamline Staunton's vast and complex site.
- To showcase the Staunton area for potential tourists, we added a slide show on the home page using the Plone Carousel product which makes it possible for in-house staff to update the slides with seasonal images.
- Dynamic content, which increases search engine rankings, was added below the slide show using Plone News and Events portlets that automatically display recent news and upcoming events. A third portlet provides a place to manually add quick links for important information.
- Because a drop down menu becomes unwieldy as the user browses deeper into the site, we added the option of tree-style navigation within each section.
- As with any municipal or government agency website, accessibility is an important consideration. Staunton wanted to insure that the visually impaired user did not have to give up design integrity when viewing the site in a larger font size. This required that we code the site to keep the design intact regardless of the browser's font size setting.
- Currently we are migrating the site to Plone 4.1, which will enable us to make the site mobile-friendly, install a drag-and-drop calendar, and create subsites. Because Staunton is a multi-department municipality, Plone's subsite solution will allow different departments to have their own domain name, theme and navigation structure while including their content in the main site. This strategy increases ease of use for visitors and keeps all the website's traffic on one site.
The Results
A city website is an ongoing and changing project. Plone is ideally suited for sites maintained by many departments with different needs and multiple content editors. Our implementation gave Staunton an easily maintained, beautiful design that is accessible, draws new visitors, and makes a vast amount of information available to its citizens.
Additional Benefits
Our relationship with Staunton's IT manager, Mike Bowen, has gone beyond the usual development phase to an ongoing partnership. Plone is technically very challenging and new functionality is constantly being developed. As his Plone consultant, we provide technical support, product advice, and real-time solutions.
Interviews and Editing provided by pagemaven.com
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The Takeaway
+ Webonobo can design your site to effectively target multiple audiences.
+ Plone can handle vast amounts of content with multiple editors, and we can design a navigation strategy to make it easy for your visitors to find what they're looking for.
+ We are flexible, open to input, and consider ourselves in partnership with you. You take your website personally, and so do we.
Client Review
"The great thing about Totsie and Winn is that our relationship is a partnership. They are not like a consulting service where it's in and out, provide the service, then go. Winn and Totsie are a phone call or email away, all the time. They will always help, even at no charge. It's an ongoing relationship.
"Winn is especially helpful as the hands-on guy, always willing to answer questions and give options. Both are just so good at what they do, and their prices are very competitive.
"Even though they're expanding their business, I feel like Totsie and Winn are there for the little guy, and will continue to be so."
Mike Bowen
IT Manager
City of Staunton, VA
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