Project Summary

The City of Ketchikan, Alaska is a beautiful tourist destination and is known as the "Salmon Capitol of The World". If you take a cruise to Alaska, this is the primary port city that your cruise ship will visit. With such beautiful scenery, we worked with the city to produce a visually stunning websites that also includes many new applications to better service residents, customers, and visitors.

We competed against other companies to win this project. One of the requirements was to include a Bid Management System. We did not have a Bid Management System, but it was on our list of R&D initiatives so we agreed to build the system at a discount, so that we could offer it to our other customers.

The Starting Point

Below is a photo of the website before we redeveloped it. The site didn't have a solid Content Management System (CMS), and it required the city to use several different vendors instead of one vendor for their website. The site was note mobile-responsive, and was very difficult to manage.

The New Design

We took a fresh approach with the design of the new site, and we took inspiration from some of the admire sites that Ketchikan gave to us.  
We also contracted with local photographers to obtain stunning photography of the surrounding region.

Final Result

The final result was one of our most successful projects, and it was completed in a short amount of time.
We have had literally dozens of cities that said to us "we what what you did for Ketchikan". See the "Lessons" section below to see how that evolved.
The new website contains a fully-functional bid management system with a customer portal.
Bidders can sign up in the website to receive email notifications of new bids that match their business categories.
The city now has a website that they can be proud of, which they can manage easily on their own.

Launch

The new website earned us many new clients, including Sitka, Alaska. Sitka is another major port city in Alaska.

Lessons

Ketchikan's new website ushered in a "Photo Rich" era in our company's designs, where text and home page features were all but eliminated in favor of a clean, polished look.
We feel that the next phase of municipal website design goes beyond the hard-core absence of all text and features on the home page.
We are now at a place where home pages can be longer, and interactive features can be stacked without killing the mobile experience.
An example of how we accomplished this next level would be the site that we built for Ventnor, New Jersey, which combines photo-rich design with interactive features.