More specifically, is it smart enough to offer your website visitors what they want?
If it clearly outlines your economic development organization's mandate, offers some appealing descriptions and images (or even video) about your value proposition, geography, and business environment, then you've got most of the basics covered. Is it clear how to contact people in your organization? Excellent! You'd be surprised how many economic development websites make that difficult to figure out.
Good start. But none of these things make your website smart, because they aren't covering the key requirement for all site selectors and businesses seeking locations: data. A truly intelligent website allows visitors to research, interact, analyze and export the data they need to make location decisions.
Our ZoomProspector Enterprise GIS location analysis tool does a pretty good job of that, and it's a basic requirement for any smart EDO website. Because it lives on only one page of your website, you can't always be sure your website visitors will find it (though we can offer many helpful, best practice suggestions to ensure they do).
While the five Intelligence Components work particularly well together (see them in action here on the beautiful turnkey data portal microsite we built for the City of Pittsburgh), but they can also be purchased separately, if preferred. Since there is no additional cost to use several customized versions of the exact same tool on different pages, it makes sense to set it to preload with different data displays on different pages.
I've been particularly impressed by the creative ways our different clients have chosen to customize some of these handy data tools so they are preloaded to show specific data. Each tool is still fully interactive, but it starts off by directing attention to criteria relevant to that region.