NYACK
Emigrant Gap, California
The Challenge
Nyack in Emigrant Gap is near Donner Summit and Lake Tahoe, California, and has been, for more than a half a century, a vital stop on for travelers, including railroad passengers, buses and automobiles. Nyack was home to the summit’s first motor lodge and restaurant, and this historic building still welcomes travelers at its Shell service station, convenience store, and fast food restaurant.
The website for Nyack was outdated and did not provide motorists traveling with the benefit of smart phones, a responsive site with vital information needed when crossing the Sierra Nevadas, including weather patterns and alerts, chain controls, maps, and information for fueling or roadside assistance. This resulted in significant staff time to answer the numerous telephone calls received, asking for this information, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.
Further, because the owners and managers have a thriving and demanding business, maintenance of the website was irregular and nearly 1,000 spam comments and trackbacks were cluttering up the site, slowly using up server resources and increasing page load time.
The Solution
Because nearly all visitors to the Nyack website are “on the road” while using smart phones, tablets or laptops, we needed to create a mobile-friendly and responsive website with simple graphics and colors and home-page access to the most important tools: weather alerts, chain controls, maps, and contact information.
We changed the out-dated images graphics to the colors used by Shell Oil, and included simple graphics to convey that Shell Oil fuel and oil, food, beverages, and services were available. We included widgets that continuously update to show weather alerts at this high-altitude location, including a link to the Twitter feed for CalTrans, which continuously updates chain controls. We also included a simple map showing the Nyack Shell location, plus two (2) additional fueling stations further up the Interstate, and telephone numbers for each of the fueling stations.
The New Website
Rebuilt From the Ground Up
We rebuilt the entire website from the ground up, with a responsive theme, plug-ins, caching, proper widgets, and fresh graphics.
Security Enhanced
We enhanced security with appropriate fencing measures, and removed hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks received over several years of irregular attention to the blog. We decreased email spam by installing a contact form handled by a webmaster.
Mobile Refresh
The responsive website immediately boosted online visits by motorists using cell phones, smart phones, tablets and laptops.
Increased Productivity
Many of the most frequently asked questions during phones calls are answered on the website, freeing up staff to tend to the fueling station, general store and counter customers.
Maintenance
As part of our all-inclusive plan, our agency checks and maintains the website every month throughout the year, updating themes and plug-ins, monitoring contact forms and comment fields, clearing cache and testing page load time.
Outdated Site
