When we travel somewhere, whether it be for an extended weekend or longer, for work or for play, there are things we obviously want to know in order to make the experience memorable. What are the best places to eat? Where will we be staying? Is there anywhere to shop? What do we have to see and experience before leaving?
For Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), they knew a more user-friendly website that answered all of those questions and more for visitors would be key to their future growth.
The Challenge
For years, CVB knew their website provided valuable information to visitors, but content was hard to find unless visitors knew exactly what they were searching for. Navigation was unorganized and hard to manage. CVB wanted their visitors to find lodging solutions much more easily and quickly.
CVB needed a custom web solution that was clean and user-friendly – allowing customers to easily find lodging locations throughout Brown County. They also needed a solution that was easy to manage, provided valuable information to their customers and offered a fun experience. They wanted their customers to be able to search for and find valuable information easily.
Brown County CVB has partnerships with local businesses as well. Restaurants, lodging, shops and other multi-faceted organizations have pages and information on CVB’s website for people visiting the area. For years, CVB was spending countless hours inputting information from their valuable partners who operate businesses throughout Brown County. Anytime a partner needed an update to information, CVB was responsible for updating that on the site.
They needed a custom solution that allowed all of their partners to login and update their pages and information that was important to them and potential customers.
The Solution
After two years of deliberating on building a new web presence, Brown County CVB partnered with Smallbox. Brown County CVB knew they wanted an Indiana company to build their new website and after they learned about Smallbox’s success with the 24-Hour Web Project and involvement in the community, they felt that the partnership was a good fit.

Smallbox built an incredibly robust content management system that would provide logins and editing capabilities to CVB’s unique partnerships. Not only did Smallbox address Brown County CVB’s lodging concerns and make it easier for visitors to locate local lodging establishments, we applied the same technology and functionality to restaurants, shops and other organizations in the community as well.
Smallbox implemented multiple calls-to-action on Brown County CVB’s new website that drive traffic to upcoming events and an interactive map where visitors can browse all of the businesses and establishments by location.

The Results
In browncounty.com, Brown County Convention & Visitors Bureau now has a robust custom web solution that is extremely easy to navigate for visitors.
Whether you’re looking for a place to stay, shop, eat or see, or if you’re looking for things to do, it’s easy to find simply by browsing and making your way through the website. You can search by things to do, see, eat, etc or by location through an interactive map. No longer does a person have to know specifically what they’re searching for in order to find it.
Clear and easy-to-find calls to action blocks throughout the site help drive visitors to finding information and content they’re looking for.
Brown County is beautiful. CVB’s new website and CMS provide the tools they need to sufficiently show off Brown County. The Smallbox CMS is easy to update content with new photos, video or other media like a live “Leaf Cam” where visitors can monitor color changes in the trees and make trip decisions based around “peak times” throughout the year.
With the addition of partner logins, Brown County CVB team members save substantial amounts of time and resources from fielding requests to edit, exchange and create new content for each individual business on the site. Now, individual businesses and partners can manage their own content anytime they want.
Feedback from users has been incredibly well received. Brown County CVB partners predominately love the flexibility the site and CMS have to offer.
Check out Brown County’s new site here.