Executive Vice President, Andrea LaRew talks about her experience working with the GrowthZone team to develop a new member and staff-friendly website.
My name is Andrea LaRew and I’m with the Northwest Douglas County Chamber and Economic Development Corporation. All the people that we work with at GrowthZone made the expectations of what we needed to get done very clear, but they were super flexible. They were able to get everything done on the deadlines that we wanted, but were also flexible with our deadlines as they needed to change. It was very easy and they transferred most of what we had on our old website to the new one so that the new content I had to create was minimal.
What do you like best about your new site?
What I love about our new site is all of the new options. Still, everyday that I do a website update I find a new module or a new something I can add that we didn’t have before. It might be a graphic or something that spins, pops, or underlines a sentence and those things weren’t possible with our other website. I love the functionality.
What feedback have you gotten from your members about the new site?
Our members love the way our new site looks – the colors and the ease of finding things and navigating through it.
Is it easy to manage content on your new site?
I feel like with the last website, we struggled with formatting of text and images. GrowthZone’s website makes it so easy to just drop things in, the text pops up the way you expect it to every time, and you don’t have to be an HTML expert to fix things. It’s so user-friendly. Every time I needed to build a new page with the old website, it would take hours sometimes to get everything just right. With this new website and the way that you can just drop things in and it looks the way you expect, it’s a huge time saver. The way that you can set up the SEO, the readability, and having tools and tips to help really makes it simple to to get that stuff right so that you do come up in Google searches and your information is out there. It will even give you a sad face if you don’t have your SEO right with key words.
Why would you recommend working with GrowthZone?
We have priced out doing a website with other web developers who have been chamber members and who are local and compared it to the value that you get with having it with GrowthZone. With GrowthZone, the integration and the time savings for me to not have to deal with two different people when I want a banner ad put up, it’s already done. The ability to pay monthly and not have to pay that fee all at once was really a great blessing for us especially during the pandemic where every chamber was struggling financially. The monthly payments option was huge.