Description
The City of Penticton is a four season destination for vacationers and business travellers alike. Cradled within tree trimmed mountain slopes, dramatic cliffs, and bordered by two pristine lakes, Penticton offers her natural beauty all year round. The semi-arid desert climate provides more than 2000 hours of sunshine each year to complement the myriad of cultural activities, international events, regional festivals, business conventions and good old fashioned relaxation.
Being such a large tourist destination, the City's focus needed to be as much on visitors as to residents, which is a change in tack from a great number of other municipal websites. The local municipal information still needed to be readily available for residents and businesses, but the additional spotlight on tourism information made this project unique.
After being picked to re-design the website for Penticton, we got down to business, creating a one-of-a-kind hybrid of tourism-focused design and detailed municipal information. The design uses a combination of stunning local photography and increased download speeds in order to create a big, bold look that truly displays the beauty of the Okanagan while retaining easy readability, a key for a municipal website's typical wealth of information.
With this requirement of facilitating both internal and external stakeholder interest, high levels of custom functionality were necessary. Functions for the site include a theme changer, which allows City staff to focus on any of the myriad aspects of the Penticton, from upcoming events to current harvests to the spectacular natural scenery. This functionality helps to keep the website fresh and website users - both locals and visitors - engaged.
Additional functionality includes: Theme changer; Google Translation; Social media integration; RSS feeds; City Spotlight; Customized event calendar; and much, much more. We also included our strong focus on accessibility standards, which allow the maximum number of users to be able to enjoy the City's new site, whether the site visitors are using mobile devices, have visual impairments or any number of alternative accessibility options. These options range from a text-resizer to mobile- and high contrast-stylesheets.
We also made sure that, as always, we adhered to the highest coding standards, using the latest coding tips, tricks and standards to ensure that the website stays easily adaptable as technology and websites progress over the next few years.
The City has also been powered up with ElementCMS, our bespoke content management system. Our CMS enables City staff to update the website themselves, meaning the site will be consistently as fresh as the mountain air they breathe.
This combination of options and control will ensure that Penticton gets the most out of their website for constituents, businesses and visitors alike.
