Cumming Utilities - Case Study

The city of Cummings 'Utility Department' approached Intown Web Design for a full logo and Web Site overhaul. The original site dated back to (date here), and therefore was not only lacking in a clean, modern design, but the site was hard to navigate, was not Web standard compliant and didn't work on mobile/tablet devices. We were very excited to give this old site a re-vamp, and are also happy to share the details here.

by Paul Cowley | Posted: January 13, 2017 | Updated: January 13, 2017

Converted from old HTML to a cms (WordPress) website

CMS based websites didn't exist when this site was first coded, so our first task was to convert it over. Not only would using a cms make it easy for the customer to update and use, but it also meant that we at Intown Web Design could perform updates, use standard W3C compliant rules, take advantage of the modern bootstrap framework and easily modify the template in the future to say a few.

Click the images below to understand just how basic the original design was.

Increased usability

First thing on the agenda was organising a sitemap, making a log of the current URL's and making changes to individual pages regarding content, spelling, merging pages and creating new sections. We also knew that this site would link to the cities online payment portals for the resident's utilities. We wanted to make this more accessible, understandable and easy to navigate. So mapping this all out before hand with our client helped us to know the pages and roughly know how to organise it all.

It was also important that the website customers could access the site using all devices, such as cell phones, tablets, laptops and personal computers. We decided to build a bootstrap template, that offers responsive elements whilst also is coded to modern web standard compliances. We would also use such plugins as:

Yoast SEO, to keep the website fully SEO friendly.
Visual Composer, to aid in the page designs and page templates within the Wordpress editor.
Slider Revolution, to give the homepage a bit of flare and modern slides
Google Analytics, to allow visitor tracking

Visitor Tracking

Please fill in this section steve

Menu Navigation Changes

It was all well and good when we made our new sitemap, but this did change at times due to client requests and our own decisions. We also relocated the menu to the top of the site instead of the left hand side. It was also very important that we displayed links as buttons for pdf downloads, created call to action buttons for online utility payments, and condensed page sections into tabs.