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.

The Four Big Easy’s

No, no, no. Don’t get me wrong. There is now, always was, and can forever only be one “Big Easy,” the happy home of joy, jazz and gin joints galore, New Orleans!

However, in honor of the Saints’ spectacular Super Bowl win, it seemed appropriate to turn their good fortune on its head - for a good cause: your bottom line. If you have a website, and you want it to work for you, especially if you want to do some business through it, there are four absolutely unbreakable “laws of easy” that you must obey at all times.
To be effective your site must be:
• Easy to find• Easy to navigate • Easy on the eyes• Easy to expand and edit

• Easy to find
Your keywords, tags and content must make it a snap for anyone searching for whatever you have to offer or they won’t know you offer it. Even if it’s a charity, once they get to your site, they have to know right away it’s you right away, or they’ll look for you somewhere else with a click of a button.

• Easy to navigate
Any site, especially a content-rich site must have intuitive, immediately accessible navigation. Busy visitors who need information need to it right away. If you have highly technical content, and “easy navigation” can’t cover all the possibilities, then you have to make “search” available on every page so your clients can get where they’re going immediately, directly.

• Easy on the eyes
Web designs not only have to be appealing, they also have to engage and direct visitors to find what they are looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible. Fastframe uses images that tell a story, and part of every story is how framed art and mirrors bring warmth to a home. First they appeal to their audiences, then let their “store services” and “location” links drive traffic into their stores.

• Easy to expand and edit
For years, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) gave designers and programmers a consistent framework for site building and updating.  But not everyone's a designer or programmer, and sites have to be updated constantly.  Today, robust Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla (above) and Expression Engine give anyone with basic word processing skills the ability to maintain even the most content rich websites. Not only does it allow you to add content, but also to add directories and subdirectories, new navigation elements, graphics (even graphic animation elements) which can be added, edited and deleted through any of the most popular web browsers, from any computer, virtually anywhere in the world.

Of course when it comes to web site visitors, everything has to be easy, because if it’s not, the next best site is just a click away. Something to think about during the coming seven months of horrific football deprivation. :-o

For more information contact Suzanne Marks at Pasadena Advertising Marketing Design.