Customer stories
Government Websites
City of Clermont
Crafting a gold-medal website to showcase a digital destination
Challenge
The City of Clermont, Florida often gets overshadowed by its major metropolitan neighbor, Orlando. For the area, however, that hidden perception and unique distinction is exactly what sets the city of Clermont apart from other Orlando metro bedroom communities. The community recently earned distinction as one of the Top 20 Cities in America “Leading the Way” in economic development and quality of life. In addition to that quiet, peaceful persona, Clermont served as the winter training retreat for a number of summer Olympians -- offering sought after training grounds for cyclists and runners. In fact, the flood of Olympians and former athletes led to the city earning the nickname “the Choice of Champions.” Old orange groves gave way to state-of-the-art facilities custom tailored of gold medalists and avid athletes.
The City of Clermont wanted to capitalize on that unique and unexpected identity by being the perfect playground for people who love being outdoors. They needed a fresh new outlet for their brand, something that would serve as an ambassador and bring new visitors, potential residents, and businesses into the Clermont community. The city decided they would invest in an inviting web experience and reevaluate their online strategy in order to promote the unique qualities of the city.
Solution
Clermont needed more than just building a new website; they needed help unlocking and translating the unique benefits of the community in a reimagined web experience. To meet these challenges, the City of Clermont turned to Solodev to bring a comprehensive approach from design to development. They used the power of the Solodev Web Experience Platform to empower site administrators to rapidly add pages and other elements and equip visitors with the latest news and information. Solodev incorporated interactive portals for residents, businesses, and visitors to do a number of actions -- anything from planning a trip, applying for a building permit, or renewing their vehicle registration -- all at one digital destination. Powerful custom modules such as a team manager, homepage slider, news manager, and multiple event calendars make it easy for non-technical users to update and add content to the City of Clermont website. The city also needed to ensure as many visitors as possible could access these resources and experience them regardless of ability.
In addition to these custom modules, Clermont leveraged Solodev’s position as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner. The Solodev platform was one of the first built from the ground up for the AWS Cloud, and the City of Clermont wanted to make the most of that partnership. This exposed the City of Clermont’s website to a breadth of opportunities available through cloud hosting. Solodev utilized AWS CloudFront, an extremely powerful CDN that drastically increased the delivery speed of the City of Clermont’s website. Additionally, Solodev utilized Amazon RDS to set up, operate, and scale relational databases (MySQL) for the City of Clermont in the cloud in conjunction with AWS CloudFront. The City of Clermont required a website that featured the latest web technologies and empowered their staff to take ownership of their website while having the power to scale up and down in parallel with website traffic. The city government also tapped into the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to have the ability to quickly auto-scale capacity to serve instances of sudden heavy loads without worrying about a crash. The City of Clermont can rest easy in best-of-breed security provided by AWS services by the increased privacy and control network access with network firewalls built into Amazon.
Result
Thanks to their use of the Solodev Web Experience Platform, the City of Clermont now has a website that reflects the promises of its real-world community on an online platform. Its use of AWS Cloud technologies also means it’s equipped with best-of-breed security practices and efficient ways to auto-scale to address varying waves of traffic. The City of Clermont can leverage its promising website as an ambassador for a community on the rise and continually attract more business and residential prospects in years to come. Clermont’s website provides a web experience for all users and helps the city live up to its Olympian status.
About Solodev
Solodev is a premier Web Experience Company and the world’s first web enterprise Web Content Management System (WCMS) built for the AWS Cloud. The AWS Cloud remains the most secure, redundant and extensible infrastructure on the planet. With Solodev, organizations of all sizes can build amazing websites, custom applications and engaging digital strategies that transform the customer experience. Leading brands like the Florida Department of Education and OneBlood rely on the Solodev Web Experience Platform to create without compromise and build unique digital experiences across any device with unparalleled control and 24/7/365 U.S.-based support. Solodev’s SaaS solution is available for purchase in the AWS Marketplace or at solodev.com.