Situation
THE UGLY: Coos Bay’s website hadn’t been updated in years and it showed.
THE BAD: The site didn’t work. It didn’t support many browsers, it was woefully out of date partly because it was hard to update and it was hard to find anything if you needed it.
THE GOOD: The staff wanted to better serve the citizens, businesses, and visitors of Coos Bay. They were ready to roll up their sleeves and learn some new tricks. (Sometimes we enjoy mixed metaphors)
Solution
We began this project with an onsite in-depth requirements gathering kickoff session, during which we guided City stakeholders to a detailed project specification, ensuring the new site would equally serve staff and citizens. The Crisp Code team delivered the new website with the ExpressionEngine CMS.
Simple site navigation - The City’s old site had “organically grown” into a navigation nightmare. Through collaboration, we were able to simplify their navigational structure. We know different users have different styles, so there is more than one way to reach important forms and information, but without circular logic. All of the navigation is also touch screen friendly.
Staff friendly management tools - ExpressionEngine makes it easy to unclutter the content managers views. Only options available to the given permission level are shown. No greyed out links or tree menus to crawl through to update the site content. Need to change permissions? That is simple too.
Many modern sites have areas that cannot be managed by the content management system. Galleries or banners are created by designers and untouchable by mere mortals. Not so here.
Learning the New Tricks - Lisa led multiple in person training sessions with City staff. Our personalized training, combined with site manuals developed by Justin Siddon enabled the City to internally manage the site within a month of launch!