Libby chamber launches new website to attract businesses and residents

After roughly nine months of development, the new website for the Libby Area Chamber of Commerce — www.libbychamber.org — was launched Friday, July 28.

“I think it’s a huge step forward,” said Lincoln County Commissioner Mark Peck, a catalyst of a Libby-rebranding project from which the website evolved.

Kevin Keohane of Partners Creative, the Missoula-based agency that developed the site, said its primary goal is to inspire people to invest in the Libby area and to relocate here. A secondary goal was to increase chamber membership — 205 members as of November 2016 — by 25 percent within an as-yet-undetermined period of time.

Because Partners Creative was involved in helping Libby officials with the rebranding project, Peck said it made sense for the agency to also develop the website, a move that Keohane’s colleague Nate Bender said “made sense not to reinvent the wheel.”

A highlight of the new site is the video on the home page. Shot at the start of the summer, the video’s intent was to “show some of this idea of untapped outdoor in a visually precise and compelling way,” Bender said. Other highlights include a design that was made to display well on mobile devices and a recreation map.

The agency said it developed a content management system to enable chamber staff to easily add to and update the website, allowing the organization to save on the cost of a maintenance agreement and also to make quick changes when necessary.

Keohane, who had never visited Libby before working on its rebranding and website projects, said “the website feels like the place I fell in love with.”

“It’s such an amazing place up there,” he said, noting his belief that many local websites don’t sufficiently convey that feeling.

In addition to conveying the Libby area’s attributes, Bender said the website is intended to offset “the inaccurate or misleading information” about the area, especially surrounding its Superfund site status, that exists elsewhere online.

To do so, Keohane said they decided to “confront it head on.”

“We decided early on not to brush the EPA under the rug,” he said. “We don’t sugarcoat it.”

One page of the website is therefore dedicated to an explanation of the cleanup efforts and includes links to outside resources to learn more.

They agency also didn’t sugarcoat website copy in the ways the language of marketing sometimes can. Keohane explained that the goal of place branding, or place attachment, is to “uncover the DNA of the people, place and its culture, and tailor (content) to the exact consumer or customer that place will be perfect for.”

“(Branding) has to be credible and repeatable,” Peck said. “You don’t try to bull**** your way through a brand.”