Sonoma County Russian River Recreation and Parks District needed a comprehensive website redesign. The original, rather generic, site lacked both visual appeal and usability. (See BEFORE image at the end of this article.)
Paige MacDonell, RRRPD’s administrator, engaged Grey Visual Design to improve the site’s visitor and tourism appeal with easy-to-use marketing outreach features on a platform their office personnel could maintain and update.
The new WordPress site, launched December 2013, opens with this introduction: “The Russian River from the Guerneville area out to the Pacific Coast is a world famous recreation area. And for as long as anyone can remember ‘going up to the River’ has been a popular way for people in the Bay Area to take vacations, whether for a day trip, a weekend at a resort or a whole summer in the family cabin.”
and includes:
- Information on each park in the district
- A historical Russian River area photo gallery
- Weather widget & Google maps
- A ‘News & Recent Events’ blog, and more.
A mailing list manager automatically emails the parks subscribers when a news / event update is published. In addition, an auto-social utility has been configured to automate those posts to Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter.