CMS Implementation

To keep up with the changing world of journalism, newspaper veterans from Livingston county Michigan, pooled their resources to launch LivingstonTalk.com—a socially-driven news website with a local slant. We worked with the founding team to build out a CrystaType implementation to meet their unique needs, including a highly-active blog section hosting multi-author blogs cross-integrated with the newspaper sections. For more information on CrystalType, visit www.crystaltype.com.

The Rotary Club of Ann Arbor wanted to liven up their website with a complete redesign. In the process, they also decided to upgrade functionality and relaunch with a content management system, giving their members more control over the content as well as laying the ground for future improvements. We worked with the club to refine the website's look and feel and implement a Drupal backend. Their system now provides a collaborative calendar, blog, online newsletter, membership forms, and password-protected pages for special and committees. Over the coming months, the club plans to add a database-driven membership directory.

Students and staff at Duke University's PhD program in ecology came to us with a goal: they wanted to transform their static departmental website into an active online community. We worked with them to build a dynamic, Drupal-based website that provides a number of social networking features, including customizable profiles, user blogs, events calendars, photo and document sharing, and moderated commenting. Additionally, we designed a clean and simple theme for the website; one that would accommodate a lot of interaction as well as future growth.

Wolverine Office Interiors, a new and used furniture dealer, needed a way to showcase their offerings online to take advantage of a growing interest in their services. Switchback worked with Wolverine to design a sleek, modern and easy-to-use website. The built-in CMS allows Wolverine to promote and manage their used furniture inventory—staff can now quickly add or update their products, edit any page on the website and contribute to the Wolverine blog. With find-ability being a major goal of the client, Wolverine's system was built to be SEO-friendly, with custom fields for page titles, keywords and descriptions, automated XML sitemap creation and submission, as well as lean and clean code that doesn't hinder spiders like other CMSs.

Traverse City Chamber of Commerce is one of the most successful in the state, providing services for a five-county area. Over the past few years as the chamber has grown, the inflexible design of its website could not keep up, creating a unnavigable tangle of content and a lack of valuable features for its members. Additionally, the various departments within the chamber had a difficult time maintaining the information they were responsible for due to a multi-layered process. Ready for a complete overhaul of design, structure, and functionality, the chamber turned to us. After a complete redesign and rounds of user testing, we implemented an easy-to-use CMS that the staff can access and maintain and integrated it with a full-featured membership management system that streamlines their daily workflow. Learn more about Caravan, our membership management system.