Design study · County exhibition venue · Minnesota
New walls, deep roots: one site for visitors and event planners
A venue website concept for Olmsted County's new Graham Park Exhibition Center, serving two audiences who want opposite things — a family checking whether the fair is on, and a producer deciding whether their event fits the building.
Working concept responding to RFP2026-314, not a County commission. Facts and imagery come from official County records; this is not the official Graham Park website.
- Venue website design
- WordPress theme
- Event planning workflow
- Custom content plugin
- Event schema
- WCAG 2.2 AA
Graham Park Exhibition Center — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A new building inside an old civic landscape has a credibility problem before it has a traffic problem. Visitors want dependable, confirmed information — is it happening, where do I park, is it accessible, what is under construction this month. Producers want something else entirely: capacity, floor plans, what the building can actually hold, and how it relates to the wider park. Serve only the first and you never book anything; serve only the second and you strand the fair family who arrives that weekend.
The approach
The site splits those two jobs cleanly rather than blending them into one brochure. Visitors get confirmed events, arrival details, accessibility information, policies, and construction updates. Planners get an exploration of how the new building and the wider park work together, which carries their choices forward into an inquiry rather than dumping them at a contact form. Underneath is a real custom theme and content plugin — structured events, spaces, news, documents, partners, private inquiries, roles, audit history, REST endpoints, Event Schema, calendar files, and an Entra ID integration seam — because a venue site is an operations tool that staff publish to constantly, not a one-time design. Search Graham Park covers a full-text library of official material. The visual world runs fairground to steel, set in Geologica and Readex Pro over official County photography and Exhibition Center renderings.
The result
Ten routes with a working event-planning path and a full-text search across official material, tested to WCAG 2.2 AA. The language throughout stays source-safe — come, see, follow, confirm, ask — with no invented certainty about a building still under construction.
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