Tri-County Web Design, LLC

Welcome MIRS News customers!

Before you is a brief explanation of the relationship between Tri-County Web Design and MIRS News. If you have any questions or comments about this text, please drop us a line at sales@tricountywebdesign.com. We'd love to hear from you, and always appreciate your business.

Tri-County Web Design's first interaction with MIRS News was in October of 2003. MIRS wanted to provide parts of their content to the Michigan Chamber of Commerce website. To accomplish this task in a cost effective manner, MIRS would require some kind of data feed formatted specifically for the MI Chamber of Commerce website. At that point, most of MIRS' publishing was done manually by way of word processor files being passed between writers, editors and proofreaders. Our proposed solution was to build a small set of online tools to be used for administrative purposes, such as bill tracking and mass email delivery.

Now asking a business like MIRS to change pieces and parts of their publishing methods required a bit of foresight, as their staff would now be required to maintain content both online and offline. The "bottom line" is always an issue, so our goal was to make publishing more efficient while adding value. The value, in this case, was an automatic data feed that could populate several pages of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce website as soon as the data has been updated by MIRS staff.

The new Michigan Chamber of Commerce website, populated with MIRS News content, went live in November of 2003. To update any part of the MIRS content, such as the Legislative Bill Tracking, MIRS staff can access a simple set of administrative tools from any computer connected to the Internet.

It was the potential of these admin tools that prompted MIRS President, John T. Reurink, to seek further automations in their daily publishing. After all, if you can automate a few pages, couldn't you automate an entire site? The answer is yes, and that is exactly what Tri-County Web Design has done with mirsnews.com.

What started as 2 to 3 admin functions has evolved into 30+ admin functions, ranging from publishing the daily Capitol Capsule to tracking the status of 4000+ legislative bills, all of which can be accomplished with a simple web browser. Our efforts have saved MIRS staff 10+ hours per week in redundant labor, allowing them to focus on more important things, like their business.

After spending nearly seven months streamlining the MIRS admin interface, it was fairly easy to proceed with a redesign the MIRS website itself (that would be the side of the website that you see every day).

Everyone remembers the way it used to look, which served the purpose of delivering information, but lacked the technical advancements (and pleasant appearance) of many modern websites.

Many of the ideas that were incorporated into the new site stemmed from our experience in creating interactive websites. The ability to arrange or limit information (MIRS Boxes) is a unique way to accomodate all types of users. Those who like websites to be arranged in a certain way (header only, left menu only, etc.) can move boxes around, or simply remove them from the screen as they see fit. Plus, each subscriber can set his/her home page in their account preferences, so each visit to mirsnews.com will take them straight to the information they need. The subscriber forums are a new, interactive feature of the MIRS News website. Forum threads are tied directly to the stories in the daily newsletter, allowing subscribers to read and discuss the subject matter of each individual story if they so choose.

In the last 9 months, MIRS News has become one of the largest, most innovative projects in the Tri-County Web Design portfolio. Its ongoing improvement is a reflection of our committment to its staff and subscribers. We pride ourselves on its success and tout its elegant complexity every chance we get.

SPECIAL NOTE: During the course of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce project, MIRS also decided to move its website to one of Tri-County Web Design's hosting servers. This ultimately saved them 75% on their monthly hosting bills, and allowed them access to an expanded set of features that we offer to our hosting customers. One notable feature is the use of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) as a programming platform. PHP is similar to Microsoft ASP, but is free of licensing cost, so hosting expenses are minimal. Contact us to find out how our hosting packages might also benefit your website.