Appleton Parks & Rec

Website Design & Dev.

Appleton Parks and Rec in Appleton, Wisconsin, provides a vast amount of information and resources to the Appleton community. These resources include many fun and interactive activities for friends and families to participate in during all seasons. Because Appleton Parks and Rec is often a go-to for information in the Appleton community for locals and visitors alike, they have teamed up with Stellar Blue Technologies to create a new, user-friendly and informative site with user experience and navigation in mind.

Client Challenges and Goals

From over 700 classes to 609 total acres of parks, to aquatic activities, this website hosts a plethora of Appleton information. The primary challenge and goal of the Appleton Parks and Rec project were to create an informative, fun website that is easily accessible and navigable for all visitors. With so much detailed information, it could be easy for visitors to get lost or overwhelmed. Our team at Stellar Blue set an objective to create a new, custom website with user experience at the forefront. Appleton Parks and Rec provides fun, engaging, exciting activities for its community, so an additional goal was set to create a website design that accurately reflected their brand on every page. Bright colors that complimented the Appleton Parks and Rec logo would be utilized to display the information in a fun, aesthetically pleasing manner.

Stellar Blue Value-Added Solutions

In order to provide a more user-friendly experience to site visitors, Stellar Blue’s Design and Development team used Elementor, a WordPress editing tool, throughout their construction of Appleton Parks and Rec’s new website. This tool allowed the team to develop expandable text areas and counters. This produced the ability to still provide all of the information necessary, but in a cleaner, less cluttered way. An interactive and informative experience is now provided to visitors as soon as they enter the Home page.

A more navigable experience was provided by developing a more logical menu listed at the top of the page with interactive dropdown text displaying subtopics. Users can now easily navigate to their desired location of the website without having to scroll through the entire homepage or perform a multitude of clicks and searches. Further, some of their “hot” topics are highlighted in a colorful, eye-catching way, within the first frame of the home page, including Programs & Events and Parks & Trails. Each of these topics acts as an interactive image displaying several subtopics within it. This provides a better user experience as visitors can get a preview of those subtopics without even having to leave the homepage. Upon clicking into one of these, visitors are taken to a page with further subtopics of this category displayed in “bubbles” or in a list on the left, depending on the page. This allows for quick access to more in-depth information about the different components of the subtopic.

Continuing the theme of ease of use, the menu of core topics either remains at the top or in a dropdown menu at the side of each page for easy navigation back and forth as the visitor desires.

The bright colors of red, blue, green, and yellow stand out against the classic grey and white background of the website. The use of these colors provides a more aesthetically pleasing, fun sense to the website. The “fun” of the brand is further produced through the addition of photo galleries. Images of their parks and various activities fill hero images on each page, giving visitors real-life examples of the activities, programs, and parks they’re most interested in.  

Project Features

• Elementor editor
• Image galleries
• Counters
• Expandable Text Areas