Case Study: Town of Orono

The status quo

The Town of Orono – a small town of about 9,000 and the home of the University of Maine – had an outdated town website with limited information, no dynamic online services, and a single staff member assigned to maintain the site.

The challenge

RainStorm worked with the town manager and department heads to re-organize the existing website content, define new features and missing content, and arrange it all in a friendly, accessible, and well-defined navigation structure.

To market the town as an attractive option for potential business and residents, RainStorm developed a friendly, modern graphic design that speaks to both the town’s natural beauty and its active technology business community.

With an updated sitemap, fresh design, and expanded content, news, and online services, RainStorm built the site on its own custom web-based content management system, SiteTurbine.

Using SiteTurbine modules for content management, news, staff bios, and contact forms, Town staff can now manage their own sections of the website and publish their own departmental news, which is automatically connected to the site’s main news feed. This distributed, self-service approach to content management ensures the site’s news and content stays fresh and relevant, creating trust with citizens and increasing site visits and positive feedback.

The results

With the new website, traffic is up more than 13,000%, page views are 2,000% higher, and traffic from search engines has increased an average of 200%.