Look, Our New Gold Line Website Is On Track

Pasadena Advertising Marketing & Design has created a new content managed website for Foothill Extension Authority.

Foothillextension.org homepage

After a month of testing, The new foothillextension.org website designed by Pasadena Advertising Marketing and Design (AMD), has gone live to answer visitor's questions and point out directions simply, directly and immediately.
The Foothill Extension Construction Authority is building an extension to the Gold Line light rail that is planned to connect downtown Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley foothill cities, eventually extending all the way to Ontario Airport. From the website’s compelling and easy-to-navigate front page, this new design lays out the planned rail route as well as the points of interest near every city’s station along the way.
“The excitement in the Foothill Cities is growing daily, and we wanted to create a site that would justify that excitement with a graphic, interactive representation of the promise of what is to come,” explains Pasadena AMD President Suzanne Marks. “We felt is was important to capture the full spirit of the project,” adds her partner Tony Nino, “not just to help our neighbors understand the construction schedule but also to visualize the full potential of a light rail line connection to a major airport.”

Construction phase pages connect to city/station designs and nearby attractions.

“The design concept,” according to Creative Director David Ensz, “was to frame the interactive elements of the site in the graphic tradition of Plein Air artistry in the style of classic orange crate art for which the region was known.” The challenge of programming designer Luke Gschwend was daunting, “I had to create a content management system which made navigation easy and intuitive for the site visitors, yet simple to understand and update for the in-house Foothill Extension personnel."
The final site, at http://www.foothillextension.org accomplishes all of the goals beautifully. Almost all of the information visitors could want is no more than two clicks away from the home page, and for more immediate results, a search feature is available from every page.