Roseburg Area Chamber of Commerce

“The Roseburg Area Chamber of Commerce’s priority is to promote, protect and advocate for Roseburg and Douglas County businesses. The chamber is a coalition of businesses of all sizes coming together to create a strong local economy, promote business and our community, provide networking opportunties and represent businesses through political action.

The Roseburg Area Chamber of Commerce is the primary business information resource for local residents and visitor’s alike. The Roseburg Area Chamber possitivley impacts and advances this community every day. Be part of ensuring Douglas County’s economic success and long-term sustainability.​”

The chamber had a website that was designed about 20 years ago (no joke).  I had been maintaining it for about the last 10 years, but it got to the point where the Flash movies and templates were causing more problems every day. Every update I made to a template would require hours of hand coding to fix the template.  Real pain in the ass.

Sometime in 2017 I finally convinced them to get some money in their budget for a redesign.  We got started early in 2018 with a launch date of mid-December. We were doing good. Had an approved design and had most of the features figured out.  Then they went to a regional chamber meeting and came back with all kinds of great ideas for how to make the website better. 4 redesigns later, we were pretty much back where we started with all the stuff they wanted changed. Minor changes were being sent to me over and over and over again, often doing the same design more than once.  Very annoying.

Somewhere around July 2019 I finally had to use a little tough love with them and tell them that they needed to figure out how to use WordPress. We did the redesign in WP so they could maintain the site themselves, yet they were sending me emails asking me to change a word in a title.  WTH???? Anyway, months later we finally launch, I send my final invoice to try to make myself feel better for all the time I wasted and they refused to pay because it was over the original budget.  Hello?  We went over budget because of all the idiotic redesigns and repeating changes.  So, while I appreciate all work I do, I ended up working for minimum wage for the Roseburg Chamber. I still like the site and feel like I did a fantastic job, but, man, I hate the Chamber.

Even so, the website has a few notable features.

• A fully custom design using Elementor Page Builder
• A customized event calendar and ticketing system that allows them to take payments and check people in using QR codes and an app on a mobile device. At least if they weren’t afraid of technology they could.
• Integration with their membership database, Membee. The integration allows members to log into a page on the Chamber’s website to update their profile and business information. The actual member database is housed on Membee’s server, so the connection between the Chamber’s site on my server and Membee’s database on their server is pretty slick.
• A customized community events calendar using the same events plugin as the chamber events calendar, but using categories for the events so that they can be shown on a separate calendar.
• A membership directory served from Membee’s server and displayed on the Chamber’s website. With the integration (above) to the Membee profile and business information database, a member can actually update the information that shows on the Chamber’s website in real-time.
• A customized mobile view for pages that have information that doesn’t gracefully shrink. Like the home page. The slideshow would take way too long to load on mobile and the columns of icons don’t adjust properly going from desktop to tablet to phone, so I did some special Elementor modules to make the mobile views exactly what they asked for.  Of course, I didn’t get paid for it, but I’m a professional who does what he says he’s going to do, so the Chamber has a fully functional website even if they didn’t pay for it all.