North Carolina's Southeast
Showcasing the beauty and economic strength of the North Carolina Region.
Overview
North Carolina's Southeast is a beautiful coastal region steeped in history. Featuring an army base in Fort Bragg, international air and sea ports in Wilmington, and miles and miles of white sand beaches, the region is economically diverse and important to both state and national economies. In an effort to better promote the region and attract business, NCSE sought to increase its web presence and reach through a redesigned website. There was an existing website, but it was an older, static design without a lot of attractive graphics or intuitive browsing features. Additionally, it didn't incorporate their printed newsletter, leaving some key information divided and inaccessible from the web.
Partnering with Liaison Design Group, we sought to design a new site that would be dynamic, interactive, and full of information to help the NCSE inform and attract potential new businesses to the area. Working with HiFi Content Management System allowed Liaison to design a site without technical limitations, which we could then develop and launch. The resulting site works with pixel-level precision and boasts a host of custom features that make the site much more visually appealing and interactive. Additionally, the new site better showcases its ties to shipping, agriculture, aerospace and aviation, and recreation, among others.
The new site features some innovative and functional tools that really help businesses drill down and get the information they need about the region. Whether it's using the custom-designed maps, scalable from the global to the county level, creating a custom report through the report builder, or compiling metrics about demographics or industry, the new site provides a variety of ways to educate and entice businesspeople to settle or expand their ventures into the region.
Quick Facts
Site content is available in nine languages via Google Translate.
Maps built in Javascript work great on mobile operating systems.
A Report Builder allows visitors to easily compile a report of relevant features and information, tailored specifically to their business.
Integrated building and sites finder allows visitors to do real-time searches on what type of property and space is available in NCSE.
Design
Integrating Beauty and Functionality
The old site for North Carolina's Southeast looked dated--it was static, short on graphics, and in general didn't really showcase the tremendously attractive features the region has to offer. Whether it's a defense contractor looking to work with the army base at Fort Bragg, or a manufacturer looking into global expansion through Wilmington's port and shipping industry, NCSE needed a site that was both enticing and informative.
Our partner on this project, Liaison Design Group, designed a new site from the ground up, leaving only the original logo untouched. Visually, the new site features many images that tie into the geography, demographics, and industries of the region, from the background image of sandunes to photos of Fort Bragg soldiers, container ships in port, aircraft engines and textile machines. The new site visually communicates the diversity of industry in the region, and the graphics are consistent and relevant everywhere the visitor navigates. Liaison's design was ambitious, incorporating interactive maps, translation into multiple languages (via Google translate), multiple calls for action, a news section, online newsletters, and a custom report builder, all of which were enabled and implemented through HiFi.
The end result is a design that doesn't just look pretty--it has the technical expertise behind the scenes to back up the striking graphics with excellent performance and usability.
Development
Leveraging Powerful Tools for a Tailored Experience
We worked closely with Liaison to make sure that their design was functional and that all its features worked like they should. Because HiFi is a highly flexible and customizable content management system, it allowed Liaison to design the site unfettered by technical limitations--in other words, we developed the site to work for the design, they didn't have to make the design try to work according to the capabilities or limitations of a particular CMS. The result is a more powerful and more unique site. A couple of key features show some of the muscle HiFi can flex, and are key in making the site elegantly and imminently usable and useful.
Maps
The first feature to highlight is the map center, which is featured prominently on the homepage with a graphic that links to the page. Once on the page, there is a map of the world, with North Carolina's Southeast Region highlighted and labeled. If you click on the National tab, it takes you to a map of the continental United States, with major infrastructure labeled--interstate highways, east coast ports, and driving zones for trucking. Continuing to the Regional tab, you can now view the infrastructure and features specific to the Southeast region, including airports, seaports, rail lines, highways, and the Fort Bragg military base. At the county profile level, there are clickable links for each county in the region--clicking a link brings up a detail map of the county along with pertinent demographic information in a sidebar.
There are some significant elements at play in the maps. Firstly, they were all written with Javascript, meaning they will work seamlessly regardless of platform, including mobile operating systems. Secondly, the forms for the maps and information are available through HiFi's backend, meaning features can be added or subtracted, moved or highlighted, and the sidebar statistics can be updated or changed at any time by the site managers. This usability ensures that the site is easy to keep up to date so that it can deliver current and relevant information to potential business interests.
Report Builder
The site also features a report builder that helps businesses compile and share information about the region in a customized report, tailored to the company's particular search parameters. The advantage to being able to generate a customizable report are obvious: the Southeast region features an eclectic mix of industries, but of all the information provided on the site, a prospective business needs only a cross section that is relevant to their industry or related industries.
The Report Builder design makes it easy to show or hide sections for ease of viewing, and to select whichever categories a visitor wants to include in the report. When done, a Generate Report button creates a PDF file that can be downloaded, printed, or otherwise used by the prospective business.
Because the Report Builder is powered by HiFi, and all of the site information is available through the HiFi API, the report builder automatically updates when a change is made elsewhere on the site. HiFi makes it easy and streamlined to do something as crucial as having consistent and current information across all site pages and forms of presentation. Further, site managers can add or edit sections as needed. Together, these tools make the report builder tremendously powerful and HiFi puts that power into the hands of the end user, who doesn't need to be incredibly tech-savvy to modify content.
Homepage Slider
The Homepage Slider provides news and announcements on front and center on the site's homepage, and is also easily accessed and modified on the backend. The site managers can therefore rotate the slideshow, or add and subtract from it as needed.
Building and Sites Finder
Using HiFi, we integrated the Access North Carolina building and site finder, which allows people to perform real-time searches on available properties in North Carolina's Southeast. The search is customizable and pulls results from a current database of available properties to populate the results.
HiFi enables us to implement all of these disparate tools--and many others--seamlessly within a website design. The result is a bespoke site customized to the needs of each client, but without the painstaking hours of detailed work that something "bespoke" connotes. All of that detail work is going on, but it's designed into the architecture of HiFi, creating efficiency at every level of development. Therefore, using HiFi, NMC is able to create bespoke websites quickly and economically, providing a premium and tailored result within budget and time constraints.
Results
The quality of the new site is clear, and the improvements in functionality and aesthetics are immediate. The site has received some great feedback from key people, which is critical to attracting new business and growing the economy of the region.
It's safe to say that all of the new tools, features, and built-in efficiencies of the new site have put the NCSE in a great position to market itself in new media. Liaison's design reminds visitors of the beautiful coastline, and the maps, reports, and other information make researching the region's assets easy. Even more helpful, the site takes things a step further by aiding researchers in compiling and presenting the information through the report builder. HiFi ensures that it all runs flawlessly and quickly, while also being easy to update and easy for search engines to find.