FireBox built a new site from scratch for Mountwood Park, a 2,600-acre natural park just outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia. The goal of the site is to showcase the many things the park has to offer, many of which have been well-kept secrets until now. A custom news posting system and calendar of events keep adventurers updated year-round.

FireBox Studios was chosen to completely redesign the Hocking Hills Tourism Association’s web site at 1800hocking.com. The primary challenge FireBox faced was the large amount of data that would need to be integrated into the site, yet be easily accessible for visitors. For example, they had almost 400 member records, each with up to 60 database attributes apiece! We were able to import all their data into our proprietary content management software and make it available in multiple ways on the site.

For example, a visitor can choose to view member listings by categories and subcategories and alphabetically, backwards or forwards. A custom lodging search also allows visitors to find places to stay that have the exact amenities and features they are looking for, such as hot tubs, in-room internet and fireplaces.

Other features include a calendar of events, news articles, local weather, lodging availability search, site-wide keyword search and photo gallery.

FireBox built a web site for Ohio State Representative Jennifer Garrison as a vehicle to maintain communication with her constituents. Features include regular news articles and press releases, as well as categorical Legislation database. This archive details each bill Jennifer voted on and why. The site also incorporates a powerful email list management tool for sending out e-newsletters to her opt-in subscribers.

FireBox is proud to announce the latest release of our custom content management software, paraSite 2.1. Since we released version 2.0, there have been 34 entries in the software’s change log. Many of these are minor tweaks that the client never sees, but everything we do to the software ultimately makes it a more stable, faster, more functional tool for our clients.

What is ParaSite?
If you are not a FireBox Studios client, or have been a client for over a year or so, you may not be familiar with our proprietary content management software, code-named “paraSite”. We built the software in June 2005 to power the North Parkersburg Baptist Church site and have been continually expanding and improving it ever since.

The software is a tool for clients to add/edit/delete/move pages of their site as they see fit, from a simple web browser interface. It also allows us to set up complex content types like product listings, member listings, news, calendars, etc.

Notable revisions, bug fixes and enhancements in the past few months include:

• Content types can have three settings for the ‘body’ field: graphical html, plain text, or none
• If keywords and descriptions are not specified for a page, they are generated automatically “on the fly” when the page is requested. They are generated based on words and phrases used within the page’s ‘body’ field.
• Categories and sub-categories for any content record (multiple categories and subcats will be available in v2.2)
• Added ability to sort content lists in the editor by name, id, date created or date modified
• All pages can be assigned a custom URL path (ie, /news/article instead of /page.php?id=42&cid=76). This allows more search-engine friendly addresses that are easier to remember and can be separately tracked and identified with traffic statistic software like Webtrends and Urchin.
• Added ability to use PHP code within the ‘body’ field as well
• Added ability to export ANY content type or category to an Excel spreadsheet file. Simply pick one or more content types (ie, news articles, events, products, members, etc) OR one ore more categories/subcategories, click submit and immediately start downloading an excel file of the results.