Request for Quote
Website Design and Development
Project Summary
Tryon Palace is home to North Carolina's first colonial and state capitol, which includes the Governor’s Palace, historic buildings and gardens in the heart of historic downtown New Bern. Expanded in 2010 to include the North Carolina History Center and numerous interactive exhibits, Tryon Palace now has a broader range of challenges and opportunities that could be optimized, simplified and streamlined with a website that has been designed to meet specific in-house goals.
Project Scope and Goals
Tryon Palace’s new website will involve approximately 90-100 pages (not including events, calendars, etc. that would be imported) and will be comprised of content and photos that we provide. As little to no copywriting or photography is expected, this project should primarily focus on web design, navigation, CMS capabilities, search engine optimization (SEO) and e-commerce capabilities that allow ticket sales and online donations.
Specific expectations and goals of the new site are as follows:
Design
Other than logos and fonts from the Tryon Palace branding guidelines, the new website does not have to be modeled after the current www.tryonpalace.org. The primary goal is to have a clean and compelling design with a slideshow and easily accessed navigation. Whether or not the slideshow is flash or not, the primary concern is a quick load on the front end and functionality on the back end. In short, the final result must be fast, easily changed, clickable and searchable. The slideshow’s functionality should also give us an internal ability to easily update images without coding knowledge.
The design below is intended to show possible concepts through a patchwork of functionalities pulled from different sites. Specific text and menus will be outlined in the navigation spreadsheet. Refer to attached PDF Mock Up for further details.
Content Management System
Tryon Palace’s current website offers an extremely limited CMS that can only be used to add press releases, events and employment opportunities. It is imperative that Tryon Palace’s newly designed site should have a more robust CMS interface that allows on-page edits to text and photos, linking capabilities and related attributes. Being a nonprofit, governmental entity of North Carolina’s Dept. of Cultural Resources, Tryon Palace has very limited resources and does not have an in-house web management team dedicated to changes that require extensive HTML coding knowledge.
If possible, this CMS would also allow new pages to be added to the site (i.e. special event, promotion, landing page) under the same design/frame/skin with the option of defining the specific url (i.e. tryonpalace.org/candlelight). Ideally this would be an option under any section of the navigation and would also allow you to paste in apps or other HTML content (surveys for example).
CMS should also allow input areas for keywords and metadata for SEO
Navigation
A blueprint of the navigation architecture is being finalized by Tryon Palace and will be
submitted for Phase One or sooner if needed during the bidding process. However, as the process unfolds, some shifting and regrouping may be required. Ultimately the resulting navigation should be intuitive, with similar content grouped together in a way that is easy for the user to find.
Interactive Opportunities
Hoping to streamline the process for buying tickets, increasing the mailing list and bringing in new donors, an entirely new element of interactive opportunities needs to be added to Tryon Palace’s website.
Other than an external link to a PayPal account, Tryon Palace currently has no vendor to help with ticket sales or online commerce of any kind. Ideally, the new website would allow visitors to purchase tickets online for groups of 10 people or less, as well as for special events. This would also require the ability to adjust prices, number of attendees and related variables for each event. Ideally, this system would also recognize or suggest ways to upsell with tickets to events that are listed on the calendar for the same day of their visit. Tryon Palace’s current internal ticketing system is Vista.
Tryon Palace’s fundraising arm will also need its page to allow visitors to fill out a form and make a donation with their credit card as easily as possible, and preferably with an a data entry form on-page, rather than being referred to another site. The current database is currently maintained in Blackbaud and donations are submitted through PayPal.
Tryon Palace’s events calendar would be updated in such a way that the CMS allowed an option to enter ticket information when new events are added. Then the user would be able to purchase a ticket when viewing the event online.
Plugging in a social media aspect that allows sharing of individual pages, events is preferred.
A map similar to the one found here (http://www.tryonpalace.org/map.php) in an interactive format that allows user to click a specific building to pull up a photo, two sentence description and link to its corresponding page within the website. This would be a simpler version of what Mount Vernon has (
http://www.mountvernon.org/visit-his-estate/map) that is compatible with mobile devices as well.
Search Engine Optimization
This website will need to be created with the most current SEO practices, to ensure high ranking and searchable results. Not only does this mean a CMS that allows metadata and keyword updates for new pages, content, photos and related media, but a design that incorporates Google Analytics so benchmarks can be set and measured.
Mobile Capabilities
Tryon Palace’s website will need to be compatible with mobile devices.
eCommerce for Museum Store
Tryon Palace’s Museum Store would like to have the ability to sell certain items online. This catalogue of items would be broken out into approximately 10 categories. Depending on cost, this request may fall out of the scope of this project but should still be priced out separately in this quote.
The landing page would have a hero photo, a menu of about 10 categories and five or so highlighted items down the left column or across the bottom. A plug-in template would also be considered.
http://shop.biltmore.com/new.htm
Timeline
Quotes for this project should include a cost breakdown that includes as many specifics as possible and an estimated date of completion. For follow-up questions please submit to
[email protected]. Quotes for this project should be submitted no later than midnight on Sunday, June 16, 2013.
Tryon Palace, located in New Bern, NC, is part of the Office of Archives and History, an agency of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. Tryon Palace is one of North Carolina's most significant historic sites. It is the home of the Governor's Palace, North Carolina's first colonial and first state capitol, and includes historic buildings, gardens and the North Carolina History Center, which revolutionizes the visitor experience through use of the latest interactive technology. The History Center includes galleries, a performance hall, the museum store and a waterfront café. Tryon Palace's mission is to engage present and future generations in the history of North Carolina from early settlement in 1710, the development of statehood and into the mid-twentieth century. It is dedicated to collecting, interpreting and preserving objects, buildings, landscapes and events that enrich understanding of the making of our state and nation.
Tickets and visitor information are available at Tryon Palace, 529 S. Front St., New Bern. For directions and further information about special events, programs or group tours, employment and more, visit our web site: www.tryonpalace.org or phone (800) 767-1560 or (252) 639-3500.
