Homepage with dynamic news content

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Our relationship with Impello began in 2007, following the closure of our then website provider's client service department. As we scrambled to find a new website maintenance provider, one of our consultants recommended Impello, and within a matter of days, Tobias and crew had taken over the day-to-day management of our website.

Prior to our relationship with Impello, our municipality was using a four-year-old website that although aesthetically pleasing, was cumbersome and difficult to maintain, and wasn't designed with the public in mind. Updating our website was also a tedious process, often dependent upon the whims and schedules of our web service provider at the time.

Thankfully this was not our experience with Impello. Immediately their prompt and courteous service and attention to detail stood out, enabling our organization to maintain a relatively current web presence until the decision was made to undergo a corporate re-branding and website re-development in 2008.

Our Request For Proposal requested a website that was simple to navigate, and flexible enough to meet our growing communications needs. We also wanted a platform that would allow us to maintain all content on our website, without having to depend on an independent provider for simple web updates. We received literally dozens of submissions from across Canada, the United States and Asia, and upon careful review, the clear choice was Impello, and it remains so today.

Impello's Plutonium administrative tool has allowed our website to grow with the needs of our ratepayers and organization, and to evolve along with emerging social media platforms. Since our website redevelopment in 2008, we have received a great deal of complimentary public feedback regarding the clean and professional look of our website, the depth of information included within, and the innovative ways in which we've incorporated features such as the Rural Neighbourhood map, Twitter, Google Earth and our Straight Talk blog. As Alberta municipal government websites are concerned, we believe mountainviewcounty.com is second to none, and for that we can thank Impello.

MOUNTAIN VIEW COUNTY

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Challenge

Mountainview County posessed a very large and content-rich website that had been developed using traditional file-based HTML. Over several years of regular updates, the pre-determined content structure became unweildy and difficult for people to navigate to find what they were looking for. The homepage had slowly become the only reliable page to find up-to-date information. Impello originally took over day-to-day maintenance of the original website, however the site was very costly and time-consuming to maintain.

Solution

Impello developed a highly customized implementation of our core Plutonium CMS system following a detailed functional planning process. While the website serves primarily as an aggregator of news throughout the county, it is also a detailed online resource for distributing detailed documentation.

An innovative permission based file management system was developed that would allow MVC administrators the ability to assign accessability permission to each file in the site to a group or individual user of the extranet login area. A unique labelling and categorization system was also developed that allowed for single files to belong to multiple labels.

From a visual design perspective, the navigation and content displays were designed around a vertical click-show-hide menu tree model - allowing visitors to quickly visualize and browse the website section by section.

A uniuqe design requirement included the ability to change the overall theme of the website according to the current season. The entire website can be updated to reflect a seasonal theme, simply by selecting the theme from a drop down menu in the content administrator.

From customized integration of Twitter and Google Earth, to an automatic news archiving system to dynamic site theme application, the Mountainview County website illustrates the flexiblity of Plutonium CMS as a web application development framework.

Delivery

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