The Lee County Park Finder widget was an overhaul of the logic behind the parks website. When I started working for the parks department, each webpage was an independently designed page within our CMS. Users had no way of searching for parks by amenity or program offerings without visiting each webpage independently (this was challenging because there were 100+ parks across the county). Another challenge we faced was management of these webpages, as our park supervisors were operations-focused people who oftentimes lacked the technical skill to make changes to these pages, which led to out of date and inaccurate information on the webpages.

I conceptualized, developed, and implemented a homegrown what was functionally a headless CMS powered by a SharePoint List backend. Park supervisors had access to the backend to add/change programs, make changes to general park information, and post “news items” that would appear on the top of the park webpage. on the front end, the parks website gained a searchable park feature that allowed the end user to filter by park amenities and program tags. The programs system also integrated nicely with our online registration platform (Rectrac) by passing the unique code for registration-enabled programs through the URL so a user could one-click enroll from the main website.

After implementing this new solution, we experienced a reduction in calls / emails asking for general amenity / program information. We also experienced less inaccuracies and more immediate updates with timely park/preserve information from our park supervisors.