Connecting the City With Local Businesses

Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce

Website Design


1

Background

The Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce works hard to create a vibrant economy. 

The Asheville Chamber has three main focuses; to serve the community with employment opportunities and relocation advice, to increase chamber membership with a common vision of Asheville, and to conduct and share research about Asheville's Economic Development. As a very established and reputable organization, the Asheville Chamber needed a website that would be robust enough to serve the multiple tiers of services and communicate the organization's aims.

The Big Picture:

Design and develop a robust and beautiful website that showcases the main services of the Asheville Chamber.


2

Challenges & Objectives

Dynamic Layout and Sidebar

Mega Menu Navigation

Third-Party Data Integration

Content Toggling UX

Moving Forward:

With excellent project management set up, we laid out a plan that would create a website that is content rich and engaging for anything Asheville.

Dynamic Sidebar and Templates

To create a website that would truly scale with the future of the chamber, it was important to keep the content throughout the site up-to-date. We used a dynamic post structure for the homepage and sidebar, to automatically refresh the site with current content.

1. Dynamic Menus

Automatically add pages to the navigation as new categories and resources are developed.

2. Homepage Regeneration

Website engineers associated new, featured content to fit in either "Explore", "Join In" or "Do Business". This kept new pages organized and kept the homepage feeling fresh and up to date.

3. Events Calendar Sidebar

As new Events were added, the "Events Sidebar" would add a new event to the calendar and is easily accessed throughout the site.

Mega Menu Navigation

With such a robust and content-rich site architecture, the team decided to amp up the user experience by adding a preview image and lead text as the user scrolls through the main navigation. This was extremely effective in helping the user access what they were looking for. 

 1. Easy to Manage

Developed a menu-management system that let the client manage and update the image and previews within the menu with ease.

2. Design applies consistently

The mega-menus were designed with the knowledge that if a featured image was not added to a page, it would not impact the functionality of the menu. Alternatively, the mega-menu content is flexible enough to add images and text excerpts.

3. Adapted for Mobile

The mobile menu experience is quite different and a partner-menu system was developed to adapt to smaller devices. The picture and excerpt were removed in order for navigation to remain simple.

Third Party Data Wrapped in Chamber Template

Third-Party Data Integration

The Asheville Chamber has many partners and asked the development team to somehow dynamically pull content from their partners and embed it into the new Chamber site. This is how we did it:

1. Wrapped Content into the Design

We removed the outer theme from the client's third-party remote pages and wrapped them in a frame on the main site. We then passed data to the remote pages so we could still have control and search capability.

2. Incorporated into the Database

The pulled in third-party data was pulled into the website portal and content system so the client was able to feature any content they desired, even if it was from an external, third-party source.

3. Sub-Branded Section

For some sections of the website, an alternate logo was needed to best represent the content, were able to change the logo and color scheme to match the brand of the third-party data.

Toggle UX with Read More Posts
Toggle UX with Read More Posts

Content Toggling UX

Granting the page visitors the ability to show/hide information became an essential need for this robust site. We developed a toggling and excerpt UX that enabled users to open and close the information they were needing to access.

1. Show/Hide in the Menu

The sidebar menus are two-tiered with a main label and sub-content. Main labels on the menus could be clicked to reveal sub-content options. 

2. Toggle Content on the Homepage

In order to display all the content on the homepage that the client had requested, we used an accordion-style toggling module that housed a lot of content within a single container. 

3. Preview Content with Excerpts

We used a post-preview module that would format a page into a small preview in a list of content with the option to "Read More". This showed part of the content and gave the user the ability to explore for more.

Set up to Succeed:

With the incorporation of third-party data and a back-end that keeps the site updated and fresh, Greenstone met and exceeded the Chamber's expectations.


3

Website Design

The Result:

With an optimized new website equipped with capacity to handle mass data and content, the Asheville Chamber was thrilled to have a platform to promote their goals and vision for the City of Asheville.

"Our user base has doubled since working with them, and with the new initiatives we're launching we anticipate triple-digit growth again next year."
Andrew Jacobson
CEO, 1800MD

"Greenstone Media helped us get a website that worked! They also responded to and resolved our many requests within 24 to 48 hours of communication and kept us informed every step of the way. Greenstone is your best bet for web services in Western North Carolina."
Jennifer Roberts
Advent Health

"I hired Greenstone Media to develop an integrated website and online report center. I found them to be professional, creative, efficient, and reliable. I will definitely use them again!"
Rhonda Harper
Penrose Senior Care Auditors

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Susan Walters
Bend of Ivy Lodge

“Working with Greenstone Media has been easier then I could have ever anticipated. Branding was quite daunting for me and I was struggling in developing an image and website to define my company. Greenstone is an approachable “one-stop-shop” for creative and website needs.”
Alisia Parrott
Everyday Gourmet Catering

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Sync Bodywork

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REEL EZ Boat Cover

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Emilah Dawn Detoro, M.Ed.
Intuitive Life Coach

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Sue Crowell – CEO & Founder
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David, LONE MOUNTAIN FARM INC.

“We hired Greenstone Media to help us design and develop an eCommerce website for our Fishing Charter Business so our customers could book online. The website works great, easy for us to manage, and our customers love how easy it is for them to book online. Later we hired Greenstone to create a marketing plan to help us increase online bookings. They helped us implement the marketing plan and they do SEO and Google Ads for our business. They helped us increase our online bookings by almost 20 bookings in the first month!"
Kramer Clark, BOGGY BAYOU GUIDE SERVICE

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