Aptera presented the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) Genealogy Center with a website proposal following the distribution of their request for information. The ACPL Genealogy Center was seeking to develop a new web presence for the organization to better serve their patrons.
The original Genealogy Center website had been created internally and throughout the lifetime of the website had grown into a hodgepodge of links, resources, and information. There was no CMS attached to the website which required the Genealogy Center team to be reliant on the ACPL IT team to manage updates and website additions as needed.
The Genealogy Center is the second largest genealogical library in the United States, and with a younger, emerging generation of active genealogists, Genealogy Center realized that the website needed more than a major facelift. Rather, the website needed an entirely new architecture and added functionality in order to be seen as a viable resource for online enthusiasts.
As the ACPL Genealogy Center looked to the future for a more effective web presence, they laid out specific requirements to guide the direction of the new website and experience. The first and most important requirement dictated that the new web solution would need to have the ability to adapt and expand due to a multi-phase strategy the Genealogy Center desired for the web presence overhaul.
Other required components:
- Searchable online resources
- Online communication functionality
- Donation portal
- News Archive
The requested web solution also needed to have interactive capabilities in order to engage Genealogy Center visitors of any expertise and provide more opportunities for any of the patrons to access the knowledge and experience of the Genealogy Center librarians.