New websites for the Litchfield Hills and Fairfield County have been launched to serve the newly expanded Western CT Convention & Visitors Bureau. The new region now serves 63 towns and cities from Fairfield County to the Litchfield Hills.

A portal page has been built allowing navigation to either the Litchfield Hills site or the Fairfield County site. The address for the portal page is http://www.visitwesternct.com. Alternately, users can navigate to the Litchfield Hills site by using http://www.litchfieldhills.com and to the Fairfield County site by using http://www.visitfarifieldcountyct.com. The building and upgrading of these websites was made possible because of the membership program of the Western CT CVB and the Challenge Grant Program from the State Office of Culture and Tourism. continued

The new improved websites have the following features designed to promote our regions attractions using cutting edge technology.

Features for the new Fairfield County site included creating a style guide in keeping with the State of Connecticut’s marketing plan. The color scheme for Litchfield Hills is green and the color scheme for Fairfield County is purple. Specifically, we created a new, distinct front-end web site with similar style, layout, and functionality of the litchfieldhills.com site. Essentially the sites were designed to mirror each other and yet to reflect each areas distinct differences.

In order to build the site for Fairfield County, the staff conducted research and created content related to leisure travel, events and the travel trade for these segments of the website. Content for the Litchfield Hills site was updated and refreshed as appropriate. New members were added to both websites.

In order to smooth the functionality of the website and to make it easy for visitors and residents alike to plan their time in the areas "near-here" town relationships were created for Fairfield County and updated for the Litchfield Hills region.

A new advanced feature for both sites is that each listing is geo-coded in order to generate the show map feature.

Both Litchfield Hills and Fairfield County sites included the development of new virtual driving tours designed to help visitors find their way to attractions throughout the 63 town area in an easy and user friendly manner. All driving tour points were geo-coded and Google maps are generated making pre-planning easier.

Further virtual tour enhancements included the development of three new views for virtual tours, optimized for various mobile purposes. The print view includes the summary and all legs of the tours on a single page, within the margins of an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper. The email works similarly to the print view, and is sized for a typical mail reader. The mobile view is formatted for devices with small screens like the Apple IPhone, Blackberry, and other smart-phone and connected handheld devices making them truly mobile and user friendly. A link to the virtual tour section was added to the main navigation so that they are easier to find on the site.

In order to take advantage of social networking, each listing on the website has a share button. In addition to this a Facebook page has been set up for the Western Connecticut Convention and Visitors Bureau to promote seasonal events, recreational and cultural activities and insider tips.

The event section is on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works in a standardized format. At this point we are waiting for Facebook to finish developing technology that will allow us to create an events Facebook widget to keep our fans up to date with events in the Litchfield Hills and Fairfield County. The development of the events widget will be implemented as soon as Facebook infrastructure is in place.

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