The Cook County Chamber of Commerce has gone live with its website, which has been designed to present a quick, impressionistic sense of where the county’s economy is headed. The “dashboard” design offers more information on the county in one place than anywhere else. Feedback from users is being solicited.
Following months of development, a website for the Cook County Chamber of Commerce has gone live, according to director Jim Boyd.
“I hope people will spend some time with the new site,” Boyd said. “It has a great deal to offer, plus we could always use constructive feedback to make further improvements. Kathy Hellner of Looner Graphics and Sandy Schutte of Boreal Access did a tremendous job creating a fairly complicated website that does just what we want it to do.”
A centerpiece of the website, Boyd said, is a collection of graphs that together form an “economic dashboard” for Cook County. “As the name suggests,” Boyd said, “a dashboard is designed to give a quick, impressionistic sense of where the county economy is headed. Our dashboard offers more information on the Cook County economy in one place than you will find anywhere else. We hope the information proves useful to business owners, government officials, anyone who cares about the vitality of Cook County. Suggestions on how the dashboard might be added to or otherwise improved would be very welcome.
“A major challenge for us will be keeping the data up to date. Nothing is worse than a website that isn’t kept current. Some of this data is updated monthly, some quarterly and some annually. Unfortunately, some of it habitually lags by months or even years.”
A second feature of the website that Boyd said he hoped everyone would use is the business directory.
“This is a work in progress,” Boyd said. “We’re asking Chamber members to insert the info for their own business as they have time. Since this is the busy season, it will take a while. We hope that as we build it, this directory becomes the go-to place for finding information on Cook County businesses.”
Listings are free for Chamber members. If other businesses wish to be included, it will cost them $25 per year “We also are beginning an effort to create a companion printed business directory for the county,” Boyd said. “Anyone who has ever needed mailing addresses for businesses, especially in Grand Marais where most get mail at the post office, knows how critical the need is for an accurate, regularly updated, comprehensive business directory that includes P.O. box numbers.”
The address for the website is www.cookcountychamber.org. Contact Boyd at (218) 387-3067 for more information.
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