Home page for the Lost Creek Groundwater Management District.
- Lost Creek Groundwater Management District did not have a professional and centralized way to disseminate information to their constituents
- I was hired to build a website with the following features.
- Content management
- SEO capable
- Meeting scheduler
- Contact form
- Well verification request form
- Email notifications (for contacts and requests)
- I built the website using NextJS/Vercel as the framework and hosting, Sanity for the CMS, and SparkPost for email notifications.
Lost Creek is a water management district in Colorado whose board is responsible for the management and enforcement of water regulation. Tasks include the dissemination of information, answering inquiries about regulations, and providing various services to well owners.
A volunteer board, a large district size, and an increasing number of wells in the district were all factors that compounded the difficulty of executing properly as a management district. Lost Creek had a communication problem and hired me to help solve it.
During our discussion of the project I helped Lost Creek identify concrete and measurable features they needed. We settled on these features:
- Content management system
- SEO capable
- Meeting scheduler
- Contact form
- Well verification request form
- Email notifications (for contacts and requests)
I used NextJS as the framework because it is well suited for generating an SEO optimized static site.
I chose Sanity as the CMS to give the Lost Creek board members a user-friendly interface to edit and publish content for the website.
Sanity is very customizable and extensible; I used the Sanity API to connect the website contact forms to SparkPost for email notifications. This kept all the data in one place (Sanity) and I avoided introducing an additional database technology to handle the messaging feature.
I connected Sanity and Vercel so that the Lost Creek Board members could seamlessly publish new content on the website. When a user clicks publish in Sanity, a Webhook request is sent to Vercel triggering a re-build of the deployment. Because NextJS is generating a static site, new content published in Sanity would not be viewable until the site is re-built and NextJS re-runs its server-side code that queries the Sanity data-lake.