Park District of Highland Park »
The Park District of Highland Park serves the small northern suburb of Chicago, providing extensive programming in recreation and the arts, and offering holiday events and services to teams and leagues. They manage over 600 acres of land in 44 park areas, and offer approximately 2,800 recreational and seasonal programs.
Problem
The old PDHP website was visually outdated, extremely difficult to navigate and nearly impossible to search within. Due to the absence of keywords, it didn’t rank highly in search engines, and the site owner constantly played the ‘who changed what, when’ game. The opening of a new, state-of-the-art community recreation center prompted PDHP to engage Duo Consulting to redesign the website and implement a custom content management system.
Solutions
- Content and Information Architecture Analysis: The Duo team worked with PDHP to understand the best way to categorize and present the information currently held on the site as well as information they wanted to add to the new site. After conducting a complete content analysis, Duo established an information architecture that easily accommodated content additions and ensured that all program, event and team information was accessible within three clicks from the homepage.
- Asset-Based Content Management System: Duo created a central content database for park and facility information, as well as program and event items. This allowed relationships to be assigned between items based on categories, such as park name, park location, facilities included, program type, and intended audience. Duo designed a content management administrative interface that allowed multiple people from each department to make updates with minimal effort and training.
- Optimizing for Keywords: As a part of PDHP’s effort to be more visible in search engines, Duo provided marketing analysis on the keywords used most often to search for information on PDHP’s site. From Duo’s report, PDHP was able to implement the right keywords in their content to increase search engine relevancy. In addition to the keyword analysis, Duo built keyword management tools into the content management system so PDHP administrators could continue to track and adjust the website.
- Section 508 Compliance: Duo designed the new site to ensure access for people with vision impairments who rely on assistive devices to access computer-based information. These devices translate the information on a computer screen into automated audible output.
- Online Program Registration: Duo Consulting provided loose integration allowing PDHP to import program descriptions from the CLASS system and export registrations from the website into the CLASS system with minimal administrative effort.
Results
- New site design aligns with the more modern and elegant offline marketing materials and underscores the marketing efforts revolving around the new Recreation Center.
- PDHP site administrators can make site updates a moment’s notice. No code or programming knowledge is required.
- Site visitors can quickly and easily find content they seek.
- Site visitors can register for PDHP programs online.
- Each page is optimized for specific keywords and phrases and these individual pages ranks high in organic search engine results.
