When revitalizing a community the web site needs to reflect that initiative.  A community web site helps give the impression of commerical density which is absolutley necessary to draw the public to the area being revitalized.  Many components are involved when creating a web community (we use our recent efforts on Queen Street in Niagara Falls as an example):

The Domain Name

The www.queenstreetniagarafalls.com albeit a long domain name is a re-education to the public of where Downtown Niagara Falls is located.  As the tourism district in Niagara Falls grew, Downtown Niagara Falls lost its identity, and soon, 80% of the people believed that Clifton Hill, Victoria Avenue and the Fallsview area were the downtown core.  In order to regain Queen Streets status as downtown we needed everyone to get to know the name of the street.  Queen Street will become a brand name in Niagara Falls, somwhat like Yorkville is to Toronto or Rodeo Drive is to Beverley Hills.

Dynamic

The web site must constantly change.  The customer must realize that the community site is a site that you refer to on a regular basis in order to get up-to-date information.  A combination of features are used to achieve this;  Colour, seasonal graphics, featured articles, events calendar, ecommerce, ticket purchases and social media referencing.  These components create such a visual and content rich environment that the community is loved by your customers and the search engines alike.

Microsites

In a downtown core, the businesses that draw foot traffic are retail oriented.  Restaurants, boutiques, entertainment, etc, are the big draw when revitalizing a downtown and must be featured regularly in order to educate the customer as to why they want the downtown experience.  Microsites are mini web addresses that represent each business and should have url friendly addresses for easy search engine indexing.  Microsites need to include photos, preferably videos, and of course content.  If you have a CMS (Content Management System) in place, you can place the individual business owners in charge of maintaining their own microsites.  The community web site must have a CMS system in place, it is absolutely necessary for all staff to be able to update and refresh the site, and to not be held hostage to a web firm to update it.  A CMS sytems allows you to update on the fly and create just in time marketing initiatives and events, which tend to be the situation while you are in "building" mode.

Calendars

Calendars are a great starting point for teaching your clients that your site is a site they need to bookmark so that they can continue to reference all the great events that are happening in your downtown.  It is wise to have the calendar of events populate most of the other pages and to do so, we normally create a right hand column that allows us to manipulate the site through text driven event links or image driven event links.