clever mutt

The City of Athens, TX has launched a new high profile tourism website powered by Clever Mutt’s bespoke content management system.

Speaking in advance of the January 31 2011 launch, Athens Director of Tourism Darlene Forshage explained her vision for building a leading tourism website, how her requirements broke the mould of what content management systems typically offer and how she found the perfect partners in the specialists at Clever Mutt.

"Our new tourism website had to not only provide hundreds of pages of constantly changing & expanding information on local restaurants, hotels, events and more – it had to push the envelope in terms of what is possible for cities the size of Athens that are usually competing with larger metros with much bigger budgets. Our new site also had to provide tools to actively energize our visitors to spread the word about Athens constantly. This meant that social media integration and sharing tools needed to happen at every level of the site. It was critical to us that social web integration underpinned everything we did"

"Our requirements didn’t stop there though. We knew we needed to be able to manage everything from page creation, events and calendars, custom tools for brochure promotions, email marketing integration and much more – we needed a lot of custom controls to make the most of our website. We had a long list of functions and services we needed to work in very specific ways to suit our own needs – everything from how City staff user authentication worked through to customized staff dashboards, in-depth real time reporting through to modules built just for our own site and many more items" notes Forshage.

"We’d used typical content management systems before but inevitably found we were restricted in what we could achieve without major software rewrites, which was just not feasible or convenient for us."

"We realized we needed a specialist team that could not only deliver an industry leading way for us to manage our website now and as it grows, but a team that were also highly responsive and actively able to make fundamental development modifications to our platform to suit our own needs. Our needs were about as far from ‘off the shelf’ tourism CMS solutions as they could be" says Forshage.

To achieve everything, the City turned to Clever Mutt, LLC, a web applications and design company that specializes in providing custom web software solutions.

Clever Mutt’s Tiffani Hill recalls the first meeting with Darlene "it was clear that the Athens Department of Tourism had a very specific set of exciting and wide reaching goals in mind and that they had learned, as many organizations do, that a lot of content management systems are simply not flexible enough - it seems that you end up sacrificing something, such as function or design component you really want"

"Our solutions work differently and they provided the City of Athens with exactly what they needed. At Clever Mutt we specialize in innovative interface and web design underpinned by our enterprise level performance tools and we fundamentally tailor those tools to the needs of each individual client. Just a few of the tools the City of Athens Department of Tourism utilizes include high end user management and authentication, comprehensive page and media management tools, gallery and module components, real time tracking of user interaction on the front and back end, comprehensive alerts and notification systems and much more."

"Of course", notes Hill "these tools have been tailored to suit the exact requirements of the City of Athens."

"Anytime we asked if something could be changed to suit our own requirements or processes the answer was yes" says Forshage "It was utterly refreshing to work with a technology partner that worked constantly to suit our individual needs. We have a completely custom website powered by a dynamic and tailored content management system – all on a budget perfect for a city of our size"