Five websites, one airport authority, and a public that had to guess which site had the answer. We brought them together at flycolumbus.com.
At a glance
Client
Columbus Regional Airport Authority: John Glenn Columbus International (CMH), Rickenbacker International (LCK) and Bolton Field (TZR)
Sites
flycolumbus.com, launched January 2024; cmhnext.com, rebuilt in 2025
What we did
stakeholder discovery, content strategy, design, development, migration, integrations, hosting and ongoing support
The challenge
The authority runs three airports, a foreign trade zone and an FBO, and in 2023 each part of that story had its own website. There were five in all, built in 2016 on a custom system that had become expensive to keep up. Travelers looking for parking, shippers looking for cargo space and companies considering Rickenbacker all had to know which site to start on.
We held 17 sessions with CRAA’s teams over two days at CMH and Rickenbacker, and heard the same things in almost every room. The sites were hard to navigate. The same content lived in several places, and it was usually out of date in at least one of them. Updates had to go through one person. News went up as PDF attachments instead of pages people could read on a phone.
The work
We built one site with a front door for each audience: passengers, business, cargo, general aviation, Foreign Trade Zone 138 and the Rickenbacker FBO.
- Cut the duplicates. Between them, the five sites had 251 pages, including five privacy policies, five news sections and five media-relations pages. The new site launched with 74.
- Kept every old link working. 185 page-level redirects and seven forwarded domains send visitors from the old addresses to the right place.
- Turned PDFs into pages. 101 news stories from before launch now read as web posts, and documents live in one searchable Document Center.
- Connected the live data. Flight status, real-time parking from the airport’s parking system with staff overrides, security wait times, a parking calculator, terminal maps for CMH and Rickenbacker, and a service-area map and savings calculator for FTZ 138.
- Gave each team its own pages. Editors work within permissions set by their role, and 16 short training videos let new staff learn the site without waiting for a class.
- Wrote the policies with CRAA’s legal team. Privacy, terms, accessibility and more, plus cookie consent and a clean analytics setup that replaced years of accumulated tracking tags.
- Built to stay up. The site runs on dedicated, high-availability AWS infrastructure with failover, and we host and support it.
Since launch
- cmhnext.com, the new terminal program’s site, was rebuilt in 2025 so CRAA’s team can update it themselves.
- A nonstop destinations page built in 2026 replaced a third-party service. New routes switch from “coming soon” to “flying now” on their own.
- In October 2026 we added an AI chat assistant with Insights and Quick Answers, site search that covers both CRAA sites, and a rebuilt, more accessible header.
The results
- Five websites became one.
- 251 pages became 74, about 70% fewer, and no topic lives in two places.
- News and documents people can read on a phone, not just as PDF attachments.
- One contact form sends each message to the right one of 12 departments.
- Each team updates its own pages, and new editors learn from short videos.
- Dedicated, high-availability AWS hosting with failover.
