What?

OK - so this probably sounds like a very strange headline coming from us, but realistically, it's true. Heck yeah we develop awesome websites, and create great marketing campaigns that use the web as an avenue for outreach, but if you want the most return on your investment, you shouldn't be just "redesigning your website".

Hold on! Don't go and call your designer and tell them to stop working on your cool new site. What I mean is, that although your website, your web outreach and the design thereof are incredibly important, no project should be done in a vacuum.

A website is an incredibly powerful tool - yes - it should be well designed, polished, intuitive, informative and provide a great experience. But a website should always be part of your larger overall marketing efforts. It should bring your "brand" to your audience, along with all the other areas of media that your audience would normally touch. A website can be your main piece of marketing, that's OK too - but don't start with the design, start with figuring out what you need to say to the people that are going to care the most about you and your business / mission. And then design something that works to get that message out in the most intuitive and effective way possible.

Just making your website look prettier or updating old text with new text is not going give you the results you could get if you approach a project with an eye toward your brand, your message and your integration across your entire marketing effort. Does your user have an experience online that meshes with the experience they expect?

The word to remember is "interconnected". You should think of web, print, ads, facebook page, twitter posts, billboards, radio /TV and all, simply as different ways to get your message out - but the message, the feel, and the reinforcement of your brand should be consistent everywhere. 

If you look at a website in a vacuum or worse approach a web design project without assessing the rest of your marketing  you run the risk of inconsistency, and inconsistency is a dead ringer for "amateur". One sure way to create insecurity with a customer is to make them wonder if you are professional-enough, to work with them. 

For a bit more on the subject of integrated marketing and why it's important you can read an article I posted several months back by clicking here.

...Meantime, we are incredibly proud of the recent site launch  below, read on to see how we turned a complex library of analog data into a living, breathing digital resource. 

Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission
www.uvlsrpc.org

For almost 50 years the Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission has been helping the communities they serve by providing essential professional planning assistance, and yet very few people - including the towns who work with them, could really concretely understand what this group of immensely skilled people can do.

Enter Wetherbee Creative & Web. We were asked to step in to help Executive Director Christine Walker actually define in plain terms what this org does and figure out a way to communicate its vast body of work to the public.

We started by analyzing their work. We needed to get a real understanding of what they do, what services they offer and how their work effects the communities they serve. We also learned how they were storing and accessing their work - as hardcopies, in bookcases filled with big, black binders. We realized right away that what they really needed was a database to store their work and a way to use the data once it was stored digitally on a website that the public could access. What better way to communicate to the public you serve about what you do, then show them the work, allow them to interact with it, search for it and read about it. 

What evolved is what we call "The Build a Project Tool". We created a set of custom web based applications that allow the staff at UVLSRPC to enter and store their project data digitally. Along with the basic who, what, where, and how, the staff can upload related documents and photos, associate their projects with websites, the specific communities the project serves, the funders of the project, the services they provide and more.

Then, we created custom applications that allow staff to display those projects on the website in a variety of places.

The site is powered overall by a content management system that allows staff to easily update the website's general content. They can add pages and change their order, even place in photo slideshows or interactive forms easily on the fly. 

The staff continues to add projects to the database, and engage with the website on a daily basis. The communities that UVLSRPC now have a great resource, for research on local projects, and how they can utilize the great services that are available to them. But most importantly UVLSRPC finally has a concrete way to showcase their vast amount of work to the public, to let them know just what it is they can offer to help their communities grow and thrive, just as they have been doing for the last - almost - 50 years. 

Please visit the new site and let us know what you think
uvlsrpc.org