A New Era for Houston.org: Digital Continuity and Evolution
Context
The Greater Houston Partnership (GHP) is an economic development organization that strives to make Houston one of the world's best places to live, work, and do business. Their website, houston.org, serves as a resource for businesses, investors, and individuals looking to learn more about the Houston region and its economy.
As a nonprofit, the GHP operates under a mission to improve the quality of life for Houstonians by promoting economic development, creating jobs, attracting investment, foreign trade, contributing to the region’s GDP, fostering innovation, and advocating for sound public policy at the local, state and federal levels.
The goal of Houston.org for their website is to develop a digital experience that reflects their brand image and values, promoting the city as one of the best places to do business and increasing membership. To achieve this, they aim to improve user experience, promote partnership between members, leverage Drupal expertise, increase overall performance, and ensure scalability and stability through continuous operational excellence. They also prioritize content editing ease for their marketing team, correcting friction and glitches to decrease bounce rates, building an intelligent ecosystem that can grow, and assuring continuous improvement and evolution.
The pandemic, inflation, and recession concerns have made this work more challenging. But the resilience and fortitude of Houston companies, coupled with the spirit of Houstonians themselves, helped their region recover from all of their pandemic-induced job losses and positioned this region among the strongest economies in the nation.
With 950 member companies in the 12-county region, the GHP represents one-fifth of all jobs in Houston. Houston.org is dedicated to maintaining its position as a leading economic development organization, and they are actively pursuing ongoing support to ensure their website remains cutting-edge. To achieve this goal, Symetris has been brought on board to spearhead the development of a comprehensive digital strategy for future web enhancements. As the first phase of this ongoing collaboration, Symetris is conducting a thorough technical audit. The next phase would then be focused on addressing any identified bugs, implementing necessary fixes and, upgrading the website to the latest version of Drupal, leveraging the powerful WebOps platform provided by Pantheon. Exciting developments lie ahead for this project as Houston.org continues to evolve and innovate.
By engaging with stakeholders, Symetris has been able to determine the current and future needs of the website, develop a digital roadmap, and execute robust improvements that will guide Houston.org's web development efforts in the years to come. These continued efforts would help Houston.org's website remain best-in-class among its peers in the economic development industry. Moreover, Symetris aims to create a dynamic website and restructure digital communication strategies directed towards a three-fold increase in media coverage.
Develop a digital experience which reflects their brand image and values
Improve user experience through guided customer journeys, improved integrations, and better UX/UI design
Leverage Drupal expertise to overcome technical challenges
Ensure scalability and stability through continuous operational excellence
Pantheon
Given the focus on Houston.org’s site performance, site scalability, and stability, Pantheon is the perfect solution for this project. With its global CDN and advanced site caching capabilities, Pantheon is helping make Houston.org significantly faster, thereby increasing visitor engagement. Pantheon is also known industry-wide for its unlimited scalability and uptime. As site traffic is anticipated to increase, the Pantheon platform has the ability to automatically add resources to ensure Houston.org is constantly performing at its best. Finally, by combining Pantheon workflows with Drupal, Houston.org will be empowered to continually improve its customer experience and make content updates as needed.
Member portal, digital stability and scalability
Houston.org currently faces a subpar user experience on their member portal, coupled with concerns over digital stability and scalability. To address this issue, Symetris has recommended a solution that involves a redesign of the member portal with Drupal integration. This approach is designed to improve the overall customer experience, streamline information transfer between the CMS and member portal, and provide a sustainable and expandable digital foundation for Houston.org's business.
Lack of internal flexibility and content management issues
Houston.org's marketing team encountered issues in updating website content due to a lack of internal team flexibility and CMS disconnect. Specifically, updating the partner list component required developer assistance. Symetris has been able to address this challenge by proposing to optimize the CMS, which results in seamless content updates for all users and increased flexibility for the partner list component. This solution will make it easier for Houston.org to manage partners, update website content, streamline their operations, and ensure partner recognition without the need for technical assistance.