“ITDi has gone above and beyond – and continues to do so – in making certain their product/our website is achieving the goals we collectively set for it. We love the ease of use, as well as the e-commerce options.” – Rob Cole, Operations Coordinator, Bays Mountain Park
Bays Mountain Park came to us via referral to solve their Kingsport web design needs. Most pressing among those needs were an updated design and a Content Management System (CMS) which made it easy for them to make updates.
Our design team put together a striking design including a new logo area which is based off of their angular entrance sign and exisiting logo. The colors and graphics on the home page portrayed the earthy tones of this woodland park and the state-of-the-art planetarium which is a huge regional draw. Bays Mountain is well-known for their wolf habitat, so we made prominent use of wolves in home page slider images as well as wolf footprints across the header.
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The site is set up on the WordPress CMS which allows multiple Bays Mountain Park staff to have separate back-end accounts and editing access. Ken Childress, Park Manager, wanted to make sure that the site stayed up-to-date with fresh information, so it was imperative that the CMS was easy to use.
Our team scheduled and facilitated an on-site WordPress training course to instruct appropriate staff on the use of the CMS.
“Our new website allows us to make changes and updates ourselves and can be done my multiple, approved staff as opposed to becoming ‘bogged’ down while one website manager tried to make all the changes and/or updates.” – Rob Cole
Multiple Microsites
In our initial talks with their team, we discovered an objective that they wanted to accomplish. There are two areas of the park that needed to be marketed both to the general park-goers and their own specific niches – the Planetarium and the Adventure Course. Bays Mountain produces their own fantastic planetarium shows in-house and leases them to planetarium theaters around the world. Our solution was to develop a “microsite” or mini-website that could be used to market the planetarium shows specifically. This microsite includes a customized design with space graphics in the header and background and a distinct top menu navigation system which keeps microsite visitors on the show leasing section and not back to the general park areas of the site.
The other new niche the Park was aiming to target was the high ropes Adventure Course. The course offers opportunities for corporate and group team building as well as birthday parties, scouting events, etc. So we again took the custom design from the main site and inserted niche-specific design elements (rope, carabiners, platform) to brand the microsite . . .
“People should know ITDi presents and conducts themselves as part of a team and not an outside entity with a stiff ‘tried and true’ method that just doesn’t work. For us, ITDi feels more like a partner than simply a business client.” – Rob Cole
Urgent Alerts Popup
Bays Mountain Park sits on top of a mountain and they routinely experience closures due to weather and road repair. They needed an easy way to show site-wide alerts to make visitors aware of park closures. We installed and customized a plugin called Super Popup which has worked great for these alerts. The popup darkens the rest of the screen and requires the viewer to close the box after reading the alert before accessing the site. Here is a screenshot of one of their recent on-site alerts . . .
“Truly a pleasant experience with an open-minded and sincere staff, while at the same time being aggressive in researching and finding best options for website aesthetics, functionality and more.” – Rob Cole
Custom Contact Forms
Bays Mountain Park sees a lot of school groups and the method for teachers to contact the Park was phone-only. So we built a custom contact form for teachers which saved both the teachers and Park staff a lot of time and hassle. We also built a custom contact form for the Adventure Course. Both forms provide Park staff with the information necessary to get their visits scheduled.
Donations
Though predominantly city-funded, the Park relies partly on donations to accomplish their goals. Facilitating easy donations online was another priority for the new site. We built custom “Calls To Action” to invite visitors to make a donation via PayPal. After the site was built, requests came in to be able to mark donations to go to certain programs or “in honor of” or “in memory of”. So we customized the PayPal entry fields to make these types of notes on the donations.
Calendar
Bays Mountain Park is a busy place. Their staff was already using Google Calendar for scheduling, but none of the calendars were tied together. We worked with Park staff to consolidate their program calendars and isolate only the information which needed to be shown on the website. The revised Calendar was easily embedded and has worked well for site visitors to be able to view events and add them seamlessly to their own Google Calendars.
“You cannot replace the effort ITD puts forth to match clients’ goals and dreams with reality.” – Rob Cole
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