Payton Lozinski, Digital Marketing Coordinator for the Fort Saskatchewan & Lamont County Regional Chamber of Commerce, joined the organization about six months before its website switch. She inherited a site she describes simply: “Very, very outdated, very old school. Everything was clunky, hard to edit, and just looked very outdated.”
The platform behind it offered almost no flexibility. Content could be dropped into a fixed number of columns, but the layout itself couldn't change.
“You could only choose so many columns, and you couldn't change the width of anything,” Payton says. “If you input something, that's where it was, and that's how it stayed.”
Adjusting anything further would have required going into the CSS or HTML directly and coding around the template, something well outside her skill set at the time.
Why the Chamber Made the Switch
Payton points to one driving factor above all: how the site looked.
“In today's day and age, I think those digital assets, your website, anything like that matters,” she said. “The old website, when you went on, it looked outdated. I would say that was probably, as a whole, the organization's reason for choosing to get a new website.”
For Payton personally, the appeal went beyond aesthetics.
“Not only for the look of it, aesthetic-wise, but also being able to edit it, because it was not very good at all,” she said.
Making the Switch
The chamber didn't formally evaluate other platforms. In fact, the decision to move to GrowthZone's GZ CMS was straightforward. GrowthZone's web services led the buildout, transferring the bulk of the old site's content and building the new structure around it. Colin Fagnan, the chamber's Executive Director, worked directly with Michael on the initial scope, while Payton picked up the second-largest share of the migration work, updating transferred content and building net-new pages the old site never had. The full process took roughly two to three months, and "It kind of seemed like a lost cause before. Now I can spend more time, and not because it's harder by any means, but because I want to spend more time fiddling around with it, getting it to look better."
The Learning Curve
Payton did not have coding or WordPress experience before coming to GZ CMS. Despite that, she describes the ramp-up as simple.
“We did a little bit of a probably half-hour crash course with Michael on just the basics of things,” she recalls “And it's mainly been simple to get a hold of. Anytime I don't know how to do something, I can easily figure it out, or a quick Google search tells me what I need to know.”
"Once you know where the edit button is, you can kind of figure it out from there."
A Website That Actually Does Something
The contrast with the old site isn't about how long tasks take, it's about what's possible at all.
“Almost every single function on our homepage we did not have before,” Payton said. “Before it was a plain screen, and what we would do is just drop banners in it. It wasn't even like information or anything, really. It was just a picture of a banner.”
Now the homepage includes a rotating event carousel, dedicated ad space, and a news portal Payton updates roughly every two weeks. The chamber also picked up basic Google Analytics tracking for the first time.
Independence From Developers
The chamber never used an agency or developer before switching and doesn't now either.
“We were just kind of on our own before, and then we only used GrowthZone when we were building that website and switching it over. Now we're independent again,” Payton said.
The Result That Matters Most
The clearest sign the new site is working came secondhand; through a conversation Executive Director Colin had with a new member. That member had compared several chambers in the area before deciding where to join.
"They had told Colin that our website actually is what gravitated them towards choosing us."
Payton calls it “definitely a win” without hesitation.
Turning the Homepage Into Revenue
The chamber now sells six ad placements on its homepage at roughly $850 per year each, a functionality the old website had no way to offer.
“When it comes to non-dues, that's a huge added bonus for us that we didn't have the option for before,” Payton says.
What Members Notice
Beyond ad space, members interact with features that simply didn't exist before: a dedicated news feed (added alongside the chamber's existing blog, though the news feed now gets far more use).
“I think they're much more intuitive for members when they land on our page than our old one was,” Payton says.
The Biggest Win
Asked to name the single clearest win from the whole project, Payton doesn't split it into pieces.
“I would say overall, the redesign of everything, if you looked at our old one, you would fully understand how the redesign of this new website is probably the biggest win for all of it, whether it's the design, the look of it, the functionality.”
Advice for Other Associations
Payton points to two things that made the transition work: seeing real options before committing, and having support that didn't disappear after launch.
"GrowthZone had a lot of templates to offer, and you were able to look through beforehand that made it really clear what your new website could look like. It gave you that insight to see what that website could look like before making any decisions. Not only did it make the switch over really easy, but also, once we were on our own, we had that additional support."
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