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Tech Topics In This Article: tech platforms, Atlanta Beltline
Two million people visit the Atlanta Beltline each year, making it one of the most popular destinations in the city. But unlike other tourist attractions or stadiums, the Beltline serves as an ever-developing live-work-play environment, with new housing developments and businesses expanding across the 22 mile loop. It’s a prime real estate destination, an events hub, and a business corridor all at one time.
But as the different parts of the Beltline expanded since the early 2000s, its digital presence failed to keep up. The Beltline website hadn’t been revamped in over a decade. Disparate, and often outdated, information was kept on more than 4,500 different web pages. Meeting notes, community presentations, public documents, and important event notifications were more often lost in the digital void.
There was a “lack of a user journey,” making it difficult for people to “find the right content at the right time,” said Kelly Rosenberger, VP of Creative at Alloy, the marketing agency ultimately tasked with updating and modernizing the Beltline’s digital presence. After winning the project, Alloy set out to rethink how the Beltline could ultimately reach its diverse audiences.
“[The Beltline] has so many different audiences that they’re speaking to at any given time,” Rosenberger told Hypepotamus. “We knew that we had to create a system and a way for people to segment themselves throughout the site and be able to almost personalize their experience as they went through the site.”
For Alloy, that meant creating a “choose your own adventure bar within the masthead,” where visitors, commuters, residents, and business owners can more easily find specific information they are looking for. It also meant streamlining Beltline content down into 1,400 different web pages, making it easier for people to find the maps, trail details, event calendars, and community resources.
On top of the website revamp, Alloy worked with the Beltline to create a more a cohesive visual brand that could be recognized easily both in the in-person and digital world. As part of an overall brand refresh, including a cohesive logo and lower case “l” in its name, changes which rolled out last summer. These updates not only brought consistency to the Beltline’s identity but also enhanced its ability to engage with its community more effectively.
There have been tangible improvements to the Beltline’s digital presence. Alloy’s work helped the organization’s mobile pages load 3 times faster and its desktop version now loads 40% faster, according to a company press release.
To make the digital project possible, Alloy opted to build on Storyblok, a SaaS-based CMS alternative to WordPress. The Austrian-based, venture-backed platform makes it possible for organizations like the Beltline to manage large amounts of content while giving individual stakeholders and employees different granular permissions to control what they can edit and publish.
This shift to Storyblok wasn’t just a technical upgrade—it was a strategic move to ensure the Beltline’s digital presence could evolve with changing technologies and the growing needs of Atlanta.
“The migration to Storyblok was more than just a technical upgrade; it was a commitment to future-proofing our digital ecosystem, ensuring we can adapt to new technologies and serve our community better,” said Meghann Gibbons, Vice President of Communications & Media Relations at Atlanta Beltline, Inc.
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Featured photo from Atlanta Beltline’s Website
