GreenInfo Network worked with the National Park Service (NPS) - Anza Historic Trail again to redesign and rebuild the Anza Historical Trail website, creating a more modern and mobile-friendly design. The rebuild also focused on the user experience with the map and Junior Rangers program, while also providing resource links to NPS or other sites (blog, news, events) for users to learn more.
From a design perspective, we re-created this site almost from scratch. This includes pages for Trail Diaries, Modern Trail Stories, County Guides, an Explore the Trail interactive map, and the Junior Rangers interactive game. Some of the pages were ported over with only a few design updates to match the new style, while other pages like the interactive map were more completely redesigned.
Inspired by the previous site’s contents, user research feedback, and the NPS individual park sites, we created mockups in Adobe XD to discuss with our clients. We wanted to maintain much of the amazing content, while at the same time modernizing the site’s design and functionality. Two additional design ideas used in this iteration of the site were web map/site design standards and improvements in frameworks since we originally designed and built this site.
The data shown on the map includes historical campsites where the Anza expedition stayed, photo locations, and other points of interest. These were migrated out of the older application and into the new Wordpress-based site as custom posts, where their location and attributes are managed via Wordpress tools.
For this rebuild, we moved over to a custom Wordpress theme, Bootstrap as a front-end library, and the latest Leaflet mapping library. We rely upon standards provided by these tools for two reasons: audience familiarity (users know how to interact with web map conventions) and development efficiency (libraries provide for pre-built elements that allow us to focus on the custom parts of the site). The resulting site is beautiful to look at, easy to use, and aligned with NPS and general web standards.
