When NC State's Industrial Extension Service approached us about designing and developing a new website for them, we knew it would be one of the largest sites we’ve built. The IES is a manufacturing consulting firm created by the NC General Assembly in 1955, with the purpose of advising and supporting manufacturing in North Carolina. To date, they have helped bring in over one billion dollars to the state's economy. With such an important role in state manufacturing, the IES needed a website that presented a vast amount of resources in an engaging, easy-to-navigate format.
New Media designed the website so that NCSU IES was able to showcase the multitude of solutions they offer. We created multiple forms of engagement with a blog, a large "Just Ask!" button on the homepage (and another at the bottom of the page), news, course information and video testimonials. The In the Press page neatly highlights where the organization has recently been cited, while the video testimonials page pulls testimonials from NSCU IES’s YouTube channel and sorts the videos based on assigned tags. Visitors can also filter success stories by date, title, county, industry, and even solution.
One of the challenges of the new site was importing the many pages of the old site into ExpressionEngine. To accomplish that task, we wrote a custom script that imported the pages, saving development time and money. We also had to make sure that the new site interacted seamlessly (both functionally and visually) with the existing course registration/presentation system so that students could view and register for courses from the IES page.
A hallmark of NMC designed sites is the ease of navigation, and the IES site is no exception. The use of navigation bars that don't change from page to page, and a unified and consistent overall design theme ensure that visitors can easily find what they're looking for and don't waste time trying to find something buried in a submenu.
In the IEShop, visitors can add courses, which are offered by subscription, to their cart, providing a simple and familiar method of purchasing goods (in this case, information and training material). There are many touches like this one throughout the site that connect and engage visitors and make it easy for them to interact with the site in a meaningful way.
An expansive site, New Media delivered a solution for NSCU IES to showcase their services and success while also remaining neat and engaging for visitors. One of the big successes of this site is the integration of disparate information (NCSU courses, IES events, government, manufacturing, etc.) and its presentation to an ecclectic cast of visitors (students, companies, academics, consultants). In addition to being highly functional, the new site design is visually compelling and communicates the high level of professionalism and value of the Industrial Extension Service.