How do you put a county’s whole case to industry in one place?
Built with the Chamber under new leadership. Researched from primary sources.
Situation
They had the argument. Nobody had put it in one place.
The Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce had been quiet for years. New leadership came in wanting to change that, and arrived with a clear position: the county had a real case to make to industry, and nobody had ever assembled it anywhere a company could actually read it.
What existed instead was a printed guide, some pages that hadn’t been revised in years, and a good deal of the knowledge lived in the heads of the people who had to answer the phone. This meant that every inquiry got answered manually, and how good the answer was depended on who picked up.
They were right, and the numbers showed it. Half the county’s working population commutes out every day, against a state average under a fifth. That’s an available workforce, and it was sitting inside a commuting statistic where no site selector would ever have found it.
What we did
One place for the business case.
Labor force and wages, sector mix, tax rates and millage, utilities, highway and airport access, schools, incentives, available property. The questions a company asks in the first meeting, published, so the first meeting can start further along.
Every figure sourced before anything was designed.
We assembled a master fact sheet first: each number, its value, and the agency it came from, with anything unconfirmed tagged as unconfirmed and kept off the page. The site is downstream of that file. Nothing appears on it that can’t be traced back to a named source.
A property section sized to the county.
The county has a few dozen commercial buildings and land parcels for sale at any one time. A search tool with filters looks empty at that size and goes stale in a season, so the site lists them itself and hands the full search to the regional database that someone else already maintains.
Your Calhoun County Brief.
This came out of working with the Chamber on how a company would actually want to find and read this.
Annual and one-time figures stay separate, ranges are shown as ranges, and what’s excluded is printed rather than implied.
Presentation mode, because the reader usually isn’t the decider.
A site selector has to convince their own leadership, and until now that meant rebuilding somebody else’s web page as a slide deck. The brief goes full screen, one section per slide, moved with the arrow keys. The Chamber can walk a visiting prospect through it, and that prospect can turn around and show their board the same thing without rebuilding anything.
What we found
The materials we were given to work from contained five errors, each of which would have been visible to exactly the reader this site exists to impress.
- A workforce partner named on the source copy doesn’t serve this county.
- Rail service described as in county doesn’t exist and hasn’t since the line was pulled up.
- A funding program the county was associated with is one it isn’t eligible for.
- A utility named as a provider was absorbed into another company years ago.
- A state agency cited by name has been dissolved.
None of that was anyone’s fault. It’s what happens to written material while an organization is quiet, which is exactly the stretch this one was coming out of. But a company evaluating a location spot checks, and one wrong partner name costs more credibility than the whole site buys back.
Getting this right is most of the work.
A rebuild that faithfully reproduces stale content produces a better-looking version of the same problem.
The part worth noticing
It tells you when the answer is no.
A project over 150 jobs gets no estimate at all. It gets the county’s labor force number, an honest note that a project that size is a conversation rather than a calculation, and a phone number.
Every number carries its own arithmetic.
A figure, the formula behind it and the caveat on it are one component, so a layout change, a screenshot or a crop can’t separate them, and nothing else in the brief is allowed to render a currency figure. The dates that eventually expire are constants with a check on them, so the build complains while there’s still time to fix it rather than lying quietly in 2031.
It was built to be usable from the ground up.
Real headings, real link text, reachable and operable by keyboard, and color contrast checked against the standard rather than assumed. Every page has been checked by keyboard, at phone width, with JavaScript off and with automated testing, and the results are published on the site. Three colors in the palette are deliberately not the raw brand values, because the raw values fail at small text sizes.
And whoever’s next can pick it up.
Content is separated from the pages that display it, behind one adapter, so moving to an editing system later is a change in one place.
The downloadable Investment Guide is printed from that same content, so the PDF can’t fall out of step with the site. And the Chamber has a brand guide covering the logo, colors, type and components, so whoever works on the site next works from the same rules.
At a glance
- Client
- Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce
- The site
- Invest Calhoun, the county’s economic development site
- Engagement
- Websites, with Webmaster care
- Delivered
- 2026
- Scope
- Full build, content research and sourcing, Your Calhoun County Brief, presentation mode, property section, Investment Guide, accessibility statement, launch
- Worked on
- The framing as well as the facts, with the Chamber’s leadership
- Standard
- Built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with a published accessibility statement
- Reference
- Available on request
If your county or town needs the same thing
Tell us what you have now, and what people call the office to ask.