The Client

Ogden City, the heart of northern Utah, is nestled against the Wasatch Mountains with fantastic views to the east and the Great Salt Lake to the west. In the winter of 2002, the world's eyes were on Ogden as it hosted the downhill, slalom, and giant slalom ski events as well as the ice events for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Capitalizing on its newfound recognition and pristine natural environment, Ogden has since grown to be a recreation metropolis, with its sights set on becoming the High Adventure recreation capital of the world.

The Challenges

With all of the city's success and progress, Mayor Godfrey still felt as though the lack-luster website may be holding Ogden back. Over the years, Ogden had changed website vendors, technologies and webmasters a few times. Each time the site grew larger and more diverse, until the almost 1,500 pages had become very difficult to manage. There were also a number of tools at the city's disposal that they wanted to integrate, but knew the effort to integrate with the existing site would be both time consuming, costly and also not meet the desired level of user experience.

The Solutions

Roundedcube was chosen for the website overhaul and helped Ogden organize the site's navigation and taxonomy so the public now has a much easier time locating information without the need to understand how city departments and divisions are organized. Overall, the site dropped from 1,500 pages to about 250, even with mapping, calendaring, and document search capabilities that weren't available before.

Google Maps were integrated directly into the website with the content model done in a way that allows editors to create a new map page and plug in various Google Map parameters as they would any regular content. The result is highly customizable maps utilizing advanced Google Map features. Also, very important was the seamless integration of the city's community calendar. They are using a hosted service called Trumba for all city events across multiple independent organizations. Also, these events can be chosen for display via the Content Editor. Google Mini Search Appliance was also seamlessly integrated. Yahoo! Weather's API was utilized to show current conditions and forecasts to users interested in outdoor recreation. Not to be overlooked was the integration of their existing Worlddox Document Management Repository and WebQA FAQ systems, both of which display within the website. The solution deployed in a virtual server using the Staging Module in a web farm.

The Results

The city of Ogden's website was redesigned completely and built in Sitecore 6. The new launch boasted a new compelling design, streamlined accessible content, interactive maps, community calendar, and very efficient site management. This website is the combination of many third party tools and applications integrated tightly so that the fact there are so many various apps is transparent to the users.