Web Site Development & Hosting

Need to get more people involved? Deliver your community news more effectively? Share your research data? LIAA's experience with Internet technologies can provide a solution.

Often, the development of a web site is seen as the end of a process: Build it, make it available and forget about it. At LIAA, we see a web site as one of several means of encouraging an ongoing dialog within a community. To facilitate this dialog, LIAA has developed Community Center™ software, a content management system that allows authorized users to quickly publish up-to-date text, pictures, documents, events, news articles, databases, and maps. Feedback can then be collected from viewers of this information in the form of comments, forums, surveys, polls, and forms. The site you are viewing now is built using Community Center™ software.

Community Center™ can be hosted by LIAA or licensed to run on your Windows web server. Cost effective packages are available that include web site design, configuration, hosting, training and support. For more information, please visit www.liaa.cc.

 

Here are some example sites powered by Community Center:

• Michigan Townships Association
• Charlevoix County
• City of New Baltimore, MI
• The Children's House

Almost every issue a community faces includes some sort of geographic component.  LIAA's experience with delivering cost effective online maps can help you explain not only the what, how and who, but also the where.

 

LIAA's Community Center maps offer a flexible, robust and inexpensive way to display a wide variety of map data.  From basic road maps to thematic maps to aerial photography, data from several sources can be integrated into one interface. Tools such as zoom, pan, distance measure and area calculation as well as a powerful search feature allow users to interact with your data in a variety of ways. The close integration of maps and content in Community Center allows you to provide a comprehensive picture of the ideas you want to share on your web site.

 

Here are some example map sites using LIAA Community Center maps:

• Antrim County
• Wexford County
• Garfield Township, Grand Traverse County
• Genesee County Land Bank Property Search

 

In addition to our own map software, LIAA can help you develop map applications using ESRI's ArcIMS and web services such as Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Gathering and organizing data is the first step, but once collected, you need to make your data available to people. LIAA has extensive experience designing web-based query and management interfaces for a wide variety of databases.

Here are some example online database applications LIAA has developed:

 

• US-12 Heritage Trail
• Michigan Upper Peninsula Regional Asset Inventory
• Leelanau County Register of Deeds
• Grand Traverse Bay Water Quality for the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay
• Recipe Database for CSA Farms in Northwest Michigan