Major Website. Major Development.
Pelican Bay
The Ultimate Website for Florida’s Ultimate Community
Pelican Bay is the premier private, luxury, beachfront communities of Southwest Florida. To help improve communication between the community’s Board of Directors and its 13,000 members and several different homeowners associations, Aqua was hired to enhance community relations. One of our first initiatives was a complete audit of Pelican Bay’s communication channels, including interviews with members, commercial members, community leaders, Foundations communications staff, managers, and staff IT professionals. Through this process, we determined that Pelican Bay needed a new website to better communicate with residents, potential residents, and realtors.
Through our communications audit, we determined that the new community website needed to include:
- Efficient, intuitive and easy-to-use navigation and page design.
- Design approach focused on strong, updated visuals, and typography that offers optimal legibility to Pelican Bay resident members with an average age of 70.
- Open source programming that allows quick updates, additions and other maintenance without need of outside programming professionals.
- Search capability that draws on effective navigational hierarchy, category filters and keyword search to enable members to quickly locate desired information
- Responsive design for use on desktop computers, tablets and smartphones
- Secure member login
- Strategic interface connections to other Pelican Bay digital assets, including email, social media, community app, etc.
- News/blog functionality to easily post updated information to promote use of community resources such as beach facilities, community center, tennis courts, etc.
- Expanded presence and functionality to support the community’s onsite restaurants
- Expanded presence of opt-in tool to build the community’s email database
Regarding the size and scope of the project, neither client input or results from the needs analysis suggested increasing the number of pages beyond the current website’s approximately 150 pages. That said, the proposal called for a significant degree of new, enhanced or revised content and visuals to maximize the communications value of the online resource.
Project Features
The project is an HTML/CSS website consisting of the following elements:
- Responsive Homepage and Site-wide Template Element Coding
- Content Management System Integration
- New, original photography
- Homepage Slideshow
- Google Custom Search Engine Integration
- Member Login System with Jonas Member Database Integration
- Static Page Templates (includes up to four custom templates)
- Three-Tier Drop-down Navigation Menu System
- Printer Page Stylesheet
- Font Size Switcher
- Current Weather Widget Integration
- Social Media Share and Follow Icons with links
- Document Archive with Category Filter and Keyword Search
- Site-wide News, Announcements and Articles “Blog” with Category Filter
- Calendar of Events with Category Filter
- Photo Galleries with Category Filter
- Video Galleries with Category Filter
- “Trending” Blog Posts Feature
- Member Bulletin Board / Online Forum
- Static Page Content Integration
- Form Creation and Management System (data delivery via email)
- Email List Opt-In Feature (with list management)
- Google Analytics Integration
- Content Management System training for client
- Integration with existing community mobile app
