Although this website is no longer online, we chose to include it in our portfolio for two reasons:

Simplicity is King

The old Bloomington-Normal Area Convention and Visitors Bureau website was disastrous. Trying to find anything was a nightmare, it was incredibly difficult to update, and although the CVB had hundreds of incredible photographs to visually support their content, they were not being used to encourage users to find what they were looking for. The hard part about a site like this is that it needed to accommodate a 1 page profile for nearly every business in Bloomington-Normal, and it all needed to be organized in a way that would allow a user to navigate to any businesses profile in no more than two clicks, no matter what page they were on. Fortunately, simplifying complex systems is something we do particularly well. When we were done, the navigation had been simplified to only 8 menu buttons (two of which were "home" and "contact us") and users were able to navigate to any business profile in no more than two clicks from any location on the entire website...a feat we are still proud of to this day. As a result Google and other search engines were able to index every page on this website with ease, which resulted in massive improvements across the board for nearly all key search terms. This provided the foundation for a 4 fold improvement in total traffic during the 3 years we managed the CVB website: a feat rarely attained for a site that generates the kind of traffic that the CVB generates.

Beyond the ease of navigation for their visitors and the massive increases in traffic through the major search engines, the site was incredibly easy to update via the CMS. This saved the CVB time, money, and this paid off for them several times over by with new traffic and leads delivered through the website.

Community Calendar

We wanted to setup a calendar that would allow members of the community to submit their own events. Of course, opening up a feature like that to the public is a great way to generate a lot of spam. So we created a simple approval system that allowed CVB staff to approve or reject events submitted to the community calendar. The idea caught on after just a few weeks, and their website was receiving event submissions from all over the community. This made the CVB website a portal for finding the latest events in the community and required almost no time from the CVB staff as most events were generated by members of the local community. This is the how Cybernautic makes the web easy!

Here is what Jon Robinson from the Bloomington-Normal Convention and Visitors Bureau had to say:

"Cybernautic did a tremendous job on the redesign and launch of our website. Their conceptual work is extremely creative and their fees are more than reasonable for the amount of customer support and expertise they provide."