Case study

The Port of Ridgefield exists to bring quality jobs, economic diversity and prosperity to the citizens of the region

The Port of Ridgefield exists to bring quality jobs, economic diversity and prosperity to the citizens of the region

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  • Industry City/StateOrganization
  • Background Located in the northern section of Clark-Count, in the Southwestern corner of Washington State, the Port of Ridge field is concerned with bringing quality jobs, economic diversity and prosperity to the region.
  • Challenge The former website for the Port of Ridgefield was dated—in look and information. While the Port was attempting to present the image of a cutting-edge region in which to do business, the website told another story.

 

  • Why Sitefinity The Port of Ridgefield has expertise in many areas, but lacks technical expertise, requiring a robust, full-featured CMS that is affordable and easy to use.
  • Technical Details After settling on a design, the implementation phase of the Port of Ridgefield website took approximately one month and the focus of one developer and one project manager.
  • Results The Sitefinity implementation allows the Port of Ridgefield staff to easily add and update pages on their website, providing citizens in their region access to current & accurate information.
The Challenge

 

As a governmental entity whose purpose is to spur economic growth and development, the Port of Ridgefield in the State of Washington was accustomed working with its constituents in an active and dynamic manner, but their website was telling another story. The former website for the Port of Ridgefield was dated in its design and content, and while members of the Board of Commissioners were aware of this problem, they lacked the technical capabilities to make changes to the website easily. As a result, as a communication medium, the Port of Ridgefield website was itself an obstacle to achieving The Port Mission.

What the Port desired was a great-looking website that made it easy for their constituents to find information, while easy for the Port’s staff to update and add content—without technical knowledge. The Port had investigated CMS solutions, and found that many did not offer the features that they needed, or when they did, the licensing cost of the CMS was beyond reach.

The new CMS platform for the Port needed to provide:

  • WYSIWYG editing for content;
  • The ability to upload images and files;
  • The ability to easily manage dynamic, cascading menus;
  • A calendar and events tool;
  • A simple workflow for generating press releases—teaser content and full details.
  • These challenges were brought to OakTree Digital to assess, with
  • the request that a cost-effective solution be delivered to meet these needs.

The Solution

Overall, the Port of Ridgefield were expecting quite a lot:
a website that was feature-rich; easy to administer (even for nontechnical admins); was great to look at; easy to use, and fitting a finite budget. In the past, these expectations taken together would be incongruous. Today, the solution offered was based on the Sitefinity CMS, so our solution offered:

  • A rich feature-set that included WYSIWYG tools for content management;
  • Powerful site-wide search;
  • An event calendar;
  • End-user inquiry forms that were easy to develop in .NET due to the Sitefinity’s open, extensible architecture;
  • Attractive, professionally-designed templates that could scale with the organization.
  • No longer an obstacle to the mission of the Port of Ridgefield, the new website has become an integral medium in how the Port communicates with the citizens in its region.

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