Effective engangement
This time challenge was to make a portal which was supposed to cause truly impactful engagement for both artisans, merchants and public on a cultural level. It is understandable that it is not an easy task to achieve that and this portal is only one part of it all.
Dedicated portal
Informational portal for both public and artisans and their merchants had to be made. It was decided to keep it minimalist and make sure that it is relatively simple to use, easy to navigate and understand everything. Apart from that, it was also supposed to be for both locals and foreigners, therefore it had to be in multiple languages.
Content Management System (CMS) of choice
Wordpress was used as a CMS due to high amount of available features, customizations and convenient editing capabilities. Also, for being able to use it without knowing web coding. It was used only for publishing information. Input of any data (even for searching and contacting) was deliberately not allowed for various reasons one of which is to have less processing load on server. External service was used for working with data.
Portal base
Wordpress has a lot of themes and templates available through various options. In this case plugin was used with very good Astra theme “Earth” as a base. It was very convenient to adapt, tweak and modify to achieve final desired look.
Multiple languages
Bilingual portal was made using PolyLang plugin for versions in different languages. They were accessible via dedicated URL.
Discovery and sharing optimizations
OpenGraph, Schema.org and h-Card (HTML vCard) was used for specifying and customizing information being discovered and used by search engines and sharing platforms which can lead to rich results and user-friendly interactions. Wordpress plugin SmartCrawl was very convenient for that and overall search engine optimization (SEO).
OpenGraph
Results
Overall the launch was successful, in the end there was enough engagement and maybe even more. Website visits were noticeably gradually rising and during peak of engagement it had more than 1000 pageviews in a day. For this kind of scale of a project it is sufficient and might be even more with such amount of time, effort and investment (which includes sponsorship). Besides, around a half was representing companies from abroad which clearly indicates international level and successful communication with them.
It is worth mentioning that achieving these results also includes other aspects of the project such as marketing, advertising, communication and engagement efforts which was done separately by others involved in this project. Despite that, what was done with the website did have impact on engagement results and the website still has important use case for it all and lets it to be found and noticed and brings it all to a higher level within its scale, etc.
Pageviews Statistics
