Rick Whittington Consulting

Economic development organizations face the interesting challenge of presenting compelling data for consultants while showcasing a region’s vibrant lifestyle for companies and their employees.

The Henrico County Economic Development Authority needed to do just that, while creating a friendly browsing experience. Toney Hall, Henrico County EDA’s Director of Marketing, recalls their challenge. “We wanted to totally refresh our website, making it more appealing, exciting and user-friendly. It was our main goal to do a better job of telling the Henrico story by not only focusing on key business elements and our strategic location in the world, but also by highlighting the county’s quality of place and life.”

Having done audience research for other economic development consulting jobs, we instantly understood the challenge and had ideas to present both critical data andHenrico County’s way of life in an engaging way. “Economic development experience gave Rick Whittington Consulting the edge over the other consultants we considered,” said Hall.

We decided to focus on improving visitor engagement, knowing that the longer visitors interacted with content on the site, the more likely they would be to consider HenricoCounty for their company’s relocation or expansion. “Rick Whittington Consulting was able to create a much better balance between the mounds of site selection data embedded in our website and the county’s lifestyle and cultural offerings.”

While content on the website is displayed in many ways, the interactive map we built was one way to improve engagement and present information differently. The map pinpoints different business and lifestyle features and landmarks in the County, and serves as a foundation for future development.

The display of content was of critical importance, as was the ability to measure results of the website redesign. We implemented analytics to give Henrico EDA staff a way to not only analyze common metrics like visits and search engine traffic trends, but also built ways to measure site feature usage, see what companies are visiting the website and track phone calls and e-mail prospects originating from the website.

“Rick was very responsive and results-driven in an aplomb manner. Rick put our needs first and seemed to have the right balance between technical development and creative layout. I liked it that he told us new things about the redesign process that we could actually apply,” said Hall.

To date, results of the website redesign are positive. “Based on preliminary analytics, visitors are spending much more time on the site and visiting a variety of pages.”