FireBox Studios and the Hocking Hills Tourism Association took home a second place Middy Award in the Web Site category for the comprehensive web site we built for them at 1800hocking.com. The site is an example of technology applied creatively and effectively to portray the beauty of the Southeast Ohio’s Hocking Hills and promote tourism business in that area.

At a time when 70% of travelers use the net to research vacation destinations, 1800hocking.com represents more than 400 southeast Ohio businesses to help capture $247 million in visitor spending in Hocking County. Need to plan a getaway? Click here to start!

The Ohio Association of Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus’ (OACVB) Annual Awards of Excellence are named the “MIDDY Awards” to reflect the Midwest region of the country, as well as the states contiguous to Ohio. Participants are recognized for excellence in planning, creativity and effectiveness of message, concept and design. The MIDDY Awards competition is open to all members of the Ohio Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus. While other Middy categories are grouped by the budgets of CVB’s, the web site category is not. This means we were up against much larger markets like Columbus and Cleveland. Yay us!

When FireBox built the original website for the Colony Theatre in 2000, the restoration project was still in its infancy. Since then, the restoration group has made huge strides towards re-opening this vaudeville-era landmark.

With so many updates to make to the site and new content to add, we decided to give the site a new look and “engine” as well.

We gave the site a new layout and color scheme and integrated the whole thing into paraSite, our proprietary content management system. This system will allow Colony staff to easily edit all their pages, add news articles and events.

In addition, we added a lot of new content, including updates on the restoration progress, downloadable newsletters and annual report, a new event calendar, new Flash-based photo gallery and lots of other downloadable content.