Design study · Parks & recreation · Missouri
A virtual welcome center for Smithville Lake
A parks and recreation concept built around the question people actually arrive with in the morning — are the ramps open, is there a campsite, what is the lake doing today — instead of a department index.
Concept only, responding to RFP 78-26. Facts come from Exhibit E and the county's live sites; this is not the official Clay County Parks website.
- Parks website design
- WordPress theme
- Conditions board
- Ask + search
- WebTrac reservations
- WCAG 2.2 AA
Clay County Parks — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Clay County ran two separate web presences — the county parks site and VisitClayMO — which split the same eight places across two brands and left a visitor to work out which one to trust. Worse, the information that changes daily is exactly the information a parks site usually buries: lake level, which boat ramps are open, whether campgrounds have availability, what advisories are live. A page that cannot answer those is a page people stop opening.
The approach
One virtual welcome center replaces the split. The homepage opens on a staff-editable conditions board for Smithville Lake — lake level, ramps, campground availability, advisories — sitting above a task-first wayfinding grid, so the perishable information is the first thing on the page and staff can change it without a developer. A park finder filters all eight real places by type, activity, and town. Ask Clay County Parks answers plain-language questions like where can I camp with my horse and are the boat ramps open, from the county's own records. WebTrac reservations, The Events Calendar, and AllTrails are mapped as real WordPress surfaces rather than described as future integrations, and opt-in email, SMS, and push alerts make the round-the-clock promise real. The world is a field guide in Fraunces and Signika, brick-red on limestone, with a Smithville Lake contour motif.
The result
Twenty pages on a real WordPress theme, WCAG 2.2 AA with zero axe violations across all 21 routes, built from the county's own photography.
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