Ignite Website
In 2023, Ignite completely revamped our website to make it more regionally inclusive and reflect our newly acquired service areas while maintaining the mission and vision of the organization. The purpose of this project was to ensure our website reflected our corporate mission of leading integrated economic development growth and creating an environment for our communities and businesses to be successful while representing the various communities in our newly acquired service area of the Capital and Western Valley regions. We have transformed our website into a portal to allow businesses, communities, and partners to connect directly with the team, find resources and support, and showcase upcoming events.
In creating our new website, we were able to organize the content based on our two corporate pillars: Business Growth and Workforce Development. This structuring allows our audience to easily identify the services we offer that will best suit their needs. We also ensured the website reflected our entire service area by including the names of each entity we serve on the main page, adding a variety of photos from across the region, and including an “Our Region” page which lists each entity and links to separate pages with a full list of the communities we serve along with photos and maps of the service commissions.
The target audience for the website was designed for ease of use for our current and potential clients who fall under our two corporate pillars. This includes startups and small to medium-sized businesses, job seekers, employers seeking talent, and newcomers seeking skills-development. The website was also designed with our stakeholders and regional partners in mind, including the mayors and councils of the communities in our region, various support organizations, and community groups. The new website is meant to allow these audiences to easily identify the services and support we offer while maintaining a transparency of our involvement and participation in the communities across our region.
Since implementing the updates to our website, we have had more overall traffic to the website. Previously our average monthly site visits did not exceed 15,000. Since updating the website in early March, these numbers have grown to an average of 28,000 site visits per month. Our new “Events” page has seen over 1000 unique vistitors and “Our Region” page has seen over 800 unique visitors. We have also received several form submissions through our “Events” page to add events to the calendar. The button is linked to HubSpot so we can add people engaging with us to our CRM and pipelines.
The general “Contact” buttons on our main page have had over 150 submissions since their addition. This included several business owners who were able to connect with members of our team directly.
Each page and section of the website leads to a specific call to action that either directs people to one of our offerings or enables them to contact a member of the team directly. This allows us to create dialogue with new users of the website and make direct connections with the businesses and communities that need our support.
The development of the website will continue in 2023 to better reflect our region with the addition of a “Community Economic Dashboard” page that will contain data and important information about each of the regions. This data will allow us to better cater to specific regions based on their needs and demographics.
