Henry County Historical Group
Aug 2010
The redesign of HCHG.org for the Henry County Historical Group with a completely new look and updated CMS.
Jan 2008
This was a complete redesign to move the site to a CMS based website and the style was significantly changed.
Oct 2005
This is the first redesign with some minor design changes but a lot of underlying HTML changes to streamline the site using SHTML.
May 2004
This is the original website which was custom written, hardcoded site.
Situation
The Henry County Historical Group contacted Webbering in May 2004 to design, develop and host their website, HCHG.org.
Challenge
This organization had extensive research information about the history of Alabama but most of it was in printed form and there was very little digital text available.
Solution
We were able to register the HCHG.org domain name which was great as 4-letter domain names are hard to obtain. We setup the website and developed the site using custom HTML hard-coded pages. Due to most of the content being scanned images of documents, there was very little content that was indexable by search engines. We included information on upcoming events, gallery of historical images and history links of Henry County as well as it's namesake, Patrick Henry.
Update
In October 2005, we made some slight changes to the site style but made significant changes to the underlying code to move the site to dynamic SHTML pages.
In January 2008, we moved the site to a CMS based application for ease of maintenance, included a calendar component, restyled the entire site and improved the overall navigation of the site.
In August 2010, we upgraded the CMS, brought a cleaner look to the site with a style that matched a historical organization with random images of Henry County historical images in the header and created an organization seal. Moreover, we began a process of converting all scanned historical documents to text with all of this having to be done manually as OCR simply did not yield good results. This makes all documentation indexable by all search engines which makes the site more readily available to individuals doing research on the history of Henry County, Alabama.
Results
The Henry County Historical Group has an excellent site that gives them the capability of documenting and displaying the history of Henry County, Alabama. Webbering continues to maintain the site in a timely manner with updated content as supplied by Henry County Historical Group which includes manually converting scanned documentation into searchable text.
Testimonial
Check out Henry County Historical Group website