Created a Drupal 7 web site that replaces a legacy Flash site. The site needed to be much faster and lighter than the legacy Flash site to try and drive traffic to the business district from the I-70 corridor. The flash site was never indexed and ranked properly by search engines. Drupal was selected because of it's built in search engine optimization features and enterprise level performance.
To achieve mobile device success, a mobile sized to fit most smart phone screens was created using HTML5, CSS3 and a theme switch that senses a mobile device and displays the mobile theme to the users. The mobile users also have the option to view the regular desktop theme that uses a 960 Grid. The desktop theme was optimized to display perfectly on tablet devices and HD monitors. The reason that a mobile theme was created instead a responsive theme was ultimately because of bandwidth issues in the mountainous area. At the time of the Drupal site development the I-70 corridor and the Town of Georgetown only had access to the EDGE wireless cellular data network. The mobile theme was created to be lean and load quickly using the available EDGE network bandwidth.
Great care was taken to build a content management system using Drupal that would provide code-less content management. There is a field that contains an inline HTML editor that can be used to supplement content but it is not required. Town volunteers can manage all of the content without having to hire a web master or content manager with HTML skills. This is a huge win for the town's budget and also encourages timely and more accurate content updates.
Custom Design
Patrick Woods created beautiful graphic design options and logos to choose from. He carefully used elements of their current branding with concepts from their historic sites.
Information Architecture
We migrated data from the existing flash site and updated content during the process. The web site contains three sections of information; events, businesses and activities. Events are most predominately advertised to drive traffic to the local businesses. The activities are used to supplement the events and often drive business traffic. Each registered business in Georgetown gets a page that contains their name, address, phone number, a Google map to their location, hours of operation, a description of their business, a form to contact the business by e-mail, an embedded YouTube video, a link to their web site and a photography gallery containing four images.
Features
- Custom HTML5 Zen sub-themes using the Zen theme engine.
- Fully customized graphic design representing the town's brand and heritage.
- Google map per business and a Google map representing all businesses.
- Google maps per event and a Google map containing all events.
- Month view events calendar, upcoming events list block and upcoming events page
- Customized search results that contains images, dates and other important teaser information.
- Business pages that contain an image gallery, video field and auto-generated Google map using address fields.
- Event pages contain an image gallery, video field and auto-generated Google map using address fields.
- Information from the event pages are used to automatically generate the calendar and events lists.
- Customized JavaScript animation on the front page to advertise upcoming events.
- YouTube video field integration.
- Weather widget using jQuery plugin that displays the current weather in Georgetown using the Yahoo Weather service.
Infrastructure
- Hosted on a strong virtual private server (VPS)
- Memcached and APC caching to maximize performance
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) implemented to store and serve uploaded videos, images and other files
- Git source control management was implemented to make security updates and further development efficient and organized
- Nightly automated off-site database and filesystem backups
- Automated Drupal site and server monitoring with e-mail notifications
- Google Analytics
- Captcha and Honeypot form protection
Drupal content management system training was provided to town staff and volunteers to top off a great project.