Allegany County, MD Request for website: Responsive website redesign and CMS rebuild. ADDENDUM TWO 11/9/2017 These questions and answers are hereby incorporated into and are considered to be an integral part of Allegany County, Maryland s Tourism Request for Proposal for responsive website redesign and CMS rebuild. Question Answer 1 Can you list a few sites that you like? Or even would like to model the redesign after? Yes. See links below. https://www.exploreasheville.com/ https://www.visithowardcounty.com/ https://www.visitfrederick.org/ https://www.charlestoncvb.com/ http://visitcolumbusga.com/ 2 Is the vendor responsible for producing other content photography, video, etc? If so, please elaborate on the needs. No, but if you feel like either are important and would like to suggest a line item for either or each as adds on, we will consider. 3 What is your current CMS? Our current is Forest, a custom made system by our current digital agency. 4 How many pages of content is the vendor required to migrate? All. We can pull this data for you in an Excel document. Mostly we will be starting from scratch. 5 How many users will require training on the Three. new website/cms? 6 How many cities does the county cover? Two municipalities Frostburg and Cumberland. Multiple community towns. Approximately how many business are currently listed? Currently 1076. However, the system counts cities, event organizers, etc as businesses. A scrubbed list reveals a master count of 500. 7 Will Ads be apart of the new site? No. But possible featured listing upsells for 8 What % or dollar amount of the Hotel and Motel Tax revenue supports Allegany County Tourism? 9 Could the ideal of the directory space be explained in more detail? businesses. 8% Basically we need to include in our website business listings for Tourism lodging, restaurants, shopping, outdoor recreation, family fun, spas, golf, etc. 10 Will this be a multitenant site? Not, unless suggested by the selected agency.
11 Will someone from each business represented on the site be responsible for updates to their particular sub site? We ideally want businesses to be able to edit their listings, with approval sent to our office before live. 12 Who will have permissions to the site? Three internal staff at Tourism will have full access to the website. Again, it is ideal that businesses will be able to edit their listings, if possible. 13 With regard to SEO services, are you looking for an agency to design the new website with SEO best practices in mind or for and agency to provide enhanced and ongoing SEO services to increase specific pages web rankings? 14 Has there been any past SEO strategies or practices put in place? If so, can you broadly explain what has been done? 15 Is there data available that measures tourism visitors, income generated, demographics, etc. over the past 3-5 years? The latter would be preferred and should spelled out and reflected in the bid. No, there has not. The county has 1,064 rooms and a 61% average occupancy. We estimate approximately 315,865 overnight visitors per year with a $51 million impact to region. 16 Will there be opportunities to interview local stakeholders and representatives from Allegany County? 17 With the knowledge that Google Analytics has not been integrated with the website, is there any website data available clicks, sessions, new users, etc.? It 18 Is there a hard copy or digital copy of the Visitor Guide available for review? 19 Are you planning on using a third-party application for digitizing the visitor guide; like Issuu? 20 Do you have materials that are representative of the new brand "look and feel" in addition to the Visitor Guide? 21 Is there an official Instagram account for Allegany County Tourism? 22 Have you conducted any qualitative or quantitative market/ audience research Not unless selected, I would suggest. It is with our current; however, we will not share those specifics. Not yet. Tourism has changed hands from subcontractor of county to now under county. This is bringing many new changes including a new Destination Guide. It will be 8.5x11, and come out in Quarter 1 of 2018. The Destination Guide will be digitalized by the publisher and a Link will be provided to us to hyperlink to. The Destination Guide will be digitalized by the publisher and a Link will be provided to us to hyperlink to. No, unfortunately, not. This is simply a link on our website. Yes, https://www.instagram.com/mountain_maryland/. No. Our first Tourism Roundtable Discussion will include this and is being conducted November 13, 15
activities in the past 2 years including any online/email/phone surveys, or focus groups? 23 What are the region's biggest challenges from a marketing and brand perspective? 24 Many times our client s are frequently updating their websites with copy changes even though the website design hasn t been updated in years. How do you intended to address the copy of the website(s)? Rewrite, edit, migrate without change? 25 Besides the awarded agency meeting the specific technical requirements outlined in the RFP, what other key attributes is Maryland Mountainside looking for in its web strategic and creative partner? In other words, what will make for a successful partnership from your perspective? 26 Statistical system reports for member partner listing information. For example, the ability to run a report showing how many impressions and click-thrus any listing, event, package, coupon, or ad received for a particular partner." Does 'impressions' suggest some sort of ad serving platform? 27 Trip Planner / itinerary builder. Are you envisioning that users can create accounts and store this kind of information for later use (with logins, profile screens, etc.)? This is a wish list item. 28 You also requested that the ability for enhanced listing functionality is a must. Could you please elaborate on that? and 17, 2017. We have a broken foundation. Our most important tools, the website and our Destination Guide are not representative of the region. We need to do a better job at destination awareness and selling our region to potential visitors. Rewrite and edit. Communication, ease of doing business, the ability to be flexible, trendsetters and an agency that is proactive. No. Strictly number of unique views to a listing. No logins. Our current website allows you to create an itinerary by selecting the destination in the business listing. It is essentially building a list of places you must-see in the county. Adding an itinerary component to our new website will be a recommendations from the selected vendor and we look to them for ideas on creative and how the system operates. That is referring to the opportunity for us to upsell business listings. Right now our listings are all alphabetical. I would like for businesses to be able to buy an enhanced listing which puts them at the top of the list. 29 Are there multilingual requirements for the new site? 30 Would you like for your Instagram and other social media feeds to show up on the website? No. Yes, we would love integration.
31 Would you require the vendor to review the existing content and provide strategic direction 32 We found custom routes and trails on the website. Do you require custom maps for visitors for explore the area? If so, do you have any database or solution in use (or vision for the future, perhaps project phase II)? 33 What is the existing marketing strategy besides website (e.g. social media, offline print campaigns)? Do you use any reporting or marketing tools to track your performance? 34 Are you comfortable with vendors providing a different timeline? 35 How will your users be accessing the website? Desktop? Mobile? All three. 36 What are the most important visual elements? What components should users key in on and engage with? 37 Will you be using new content or pulling existing content from your current site? 38 Do you have an existing content outline or sitemap? 39 Do you have access to a database from your current site which could be used to import into the new site? 40 What types of content will this website have? (Video, audio, photo, pdf, powerpoint) 41 Approximately how many business are currently listed? 42 How often will your website s content need updating? Do you want to be able to update it yourself? What content do you want easily updatable? 43 What functions besides simply displaying content will your website need? (Shopping cart, membership, registration, calendar, forum, blog, security, etc) 44 Regarding Addendum, Question/Answer 49 (Addendum One) stating, It is required that we own all content and that the website can run without the CMS if needed, Can you please clarify what it meant by this statement? We would not require, but are open to the suggestions of the selected vendor. We are open to the selected vendor s suggestions and ideas. Social media is a strong component. We have a digital AD spend in market. We do also traditional media work. Google analytics and social media insights are used. Yes, we are comfortable with vendors providing different timelines. This must be a responsive design. The website should generally be visually appealing and tell our story. It is important for the visuals to generation destination awareness and promote visits. We would like the new website to be engaging and look forward to vendors supplying ideas. Existing will make up the bulk; however, we will want new pages and will provide the content. No. Yes. Video, Photo and PDF. Currently 1076. However, the system counts cities, event organizers, etc as businesses. A scrubbed list reveals a master count of 500. Content will need to be updated very frequently. We need access to update most if not all of the website content. Registration Forms may be needed in the future. Events Calendar. Blog link. If a proprietary CMS is used to build our website, then under the unique situation where we must terminate contract, then we want to ensure that all flat and working HTML files are provided and exported. This will allow us to reattached or
compile the HTML files onto another CMS. It s important that we have right of ownership of all files produced on our behalf. 45 Please specify where Staff information should be included in the proposal. (Should it be in a separate section, or should it be included within a section under Submission Requirements ). 46 Can the landing pages adhere to a specific number of layout template, or will they need to be fully customizable? 47 In pt 3 of the Scope of Services, it is mentioned that the CMS should provide the ability to edit content such as additional landing page builds. Could you please elaborate on this requirement? Does this mean that you want an option create categories and contents in the category landing page like: title, description, images etc. 48 By Weather Feeds, we assume integrating a 3rd party feed to the website so that the visitors can weather conditions at a specified? Please provide more details. Please include under the Submission requirements. Template will work. No, it is a is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. A standalone page, we can create. We would just suggest one weather feed on main page that is set to Cumberland, MD.