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The Chamber's Responsive website

Bill Watts - June 07, 2016

The Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce just got a brand new website, courtesy of WJWatts Consulting. The new website looks very similar to the old website, but its underlying architecture is much better. The new website uses Responsive Design, meaning that the website's display changes based on the size of a user's screen. This makes the website great to use on phones and tablets. The previous version of the website was not responsive. In today's phone-friendly internet, a responsive website is absolutely vital for any business or organization.

www.cincinnatichamber.com

This new version of the website provides many significant benefits to the Chamber and its members:

  1. The Chamber now offers a superior user experience to all website visitors, including mobile phone users. Users expect a website to work great on their mobile phones, and a website that doesn't is very disappointing.
  2. Part of the criteria for Google page indexing is dependent on whether or not a website is responsive. Websites are ranked higher in Google search results if the website is responsive, which will lead to more website visitors for the Chamber.
  3. To make the website responsive, a new set of CSS files were created. The new CSS files are much more efficient and streamlined than the previous files, making the website faster by improving the speed of page rendering.
  4. The new CSS files are much easier to maintain, allowing the Chamber to modify its website going forward.
  5. The overall look-and-feel of the website was not changed, to minimize confusion for users.
  6. Many individual elements in the website were improved by using the latest JQuery offerings and similar HTML components.
  7. The latest versions of Ektron templated-server-controls were implemented, to keep the Chamber current with their underlying software platform.
  8. Several other performance enhancements were also implemented to improve client-server interactions, such as cached data storage.

The Chamber wants more people to use its website, and this project directly supports that goal. A responsive website gives users the best possible experience, and this new website is something that the Chamber can be proud of.