Website
As the DLBA’s Social Media and Digital Marketing Coordinator,
I am responsible for managing the organization’s website. This includes ensuring that new content is uploaded on a regular basis such as DTLB events, grant information, Downtown Scene newsletter articles, press releases, street closures, and more.
Reorganization
During my time at the DLBA, I helped to complete a major reorganization of the site. This project was a collaboration between myself and our Communications Manager at the time, Samantha Mehlinger. We dissected each page of the website to evaluate both content and placement. Some of the major changes include: renaming “Invest” to “For Businesses”, creating a drop-down menu titled “Things to Do” in place of just the Events Calendar, creating a “News & Reports” drop-down to organize important publications, and more.
Results
When comparing the site’s analytics from before the reorganization to just 7 months after, we have seen a 43% increase in unique page views.
Dine Out DTLB
Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we began brainstorming ways to help support the businesses who were suffering from forced closures or required to operate with limited services. One of the sectors we felt we could really help was the restaurant industry. With new hours of operations and limited services, we decided to create a directory of DTLB restaurants to help connect customers with their favorite eateries. We set up a form and invited restaurants to submit their current information on how and when they were serving. With this information in hand, I created an interactive map that sorted businesses by services provided and even highlighted active street closures for the City’s Open Streets program.
Results
To date, we have added 70+ businesses to our Dine Out DTLB map and are regularly updating it with current hours, services, and new entries.
Our Dine Out DTLB map has had over 6,000 unique page views and tracks an average visit time of 2.5 minutes. Since the success of our Dine Out DTLB map, we have also created a Shop DTLB directory for retailers and an Indulge DTLB directory for personal care services.
COVID-19 Resources Page
Another project that came up with the onset of the pandemic was our COVID-19 Resources page. This page was created to offer up-to-date information and resources for all community members. I organized the page to have sections for: Businesses, Workers, Residents and Parents, Senior Citizens and Homebound Individuals, and Individuals Experiencing Homelessness. Any individual would easily be able to navigate this page to find information for them. Simply select the drop-down for how you identify and you could find regularly updated resources. In the early stages of the pandemic, this page was updated hourly.
Results
Since the page’s inception we have had over 7,600 unique page views and a total of over 9,000 page views. The average amount of time spent on our page is 2 minutes and 31 seconds. This shows that we have a strong base of return visitors who are actually using the page as intended: to find and review available resources.
