Greenville County Parks & Recreation

Greenville County Rec maintains 55+ state-of-the-art parks and facilities in Greenville County. Through partnerships with other government bodies and organizations, Greenville County Rec is also responsible for one of Greenville’s most popular assets: the GHS Swamp Rabbit Trail.

Prior to their website redesign, Greenville County Rec’s web presence did not encourage Greenville County residents to explore the many amenities that our county has to offer, nor did it make information easily accessible. Greenville County Rec sought a web design agency to better organize the content on the site, create a more pleasant user experience, and validate the organization’s existing reputation with an interactive and highly visual finished product.

With accessibility being our priority, we knew we needed to simplify Greenville County Rec’s busy main navigation bar. The existing navigation bar housed information for all different facets of the organization, which was overwhelming for users. We knew that putting too much information on one website would lead to the same cluttered and cumbersome feel that the existing site had.

To make for a simplified user interface, we split the website into five distinct “sister” sites: the main site, a Greenville County Aquatics Complex site, a Pavilion site, a Sports Tourism site, and a Waterparks site. This strategy would allow users to more easily find the information they were seeking.

From a design perspective, Greenville County Rec wanted its sites to appear personal, inclusive, and playful. To achieve this look, we paired high-quality photography with fun animation and illustrations throughout all of the websites. Each site feels unique, but they all share a common theme.

Greenville County Rec also had specific functionality requirements. It was critical for their new website to integrate with Webtrac, their reservation and registration portal. The link to Webtrac is located in Greenville County Rec’s utility navigation so that users can easily access it. This link leads users off the main Greenville County Rec site, but the landing page is designed to mirror the rest of the site so as to offer a consistent user experience.

In addition, Engenius developed a completely custom and interactive park finder for Greenville County Rec. The park finder allows users to locate parks near them using their ZIP Code, device location services, or by selecting specific park features. The map uses Google Maps Javascript API and shows results as marker pins on the map as well as in list format under the map. Each result has its own dedicated landing page that features the address, phone number, and various amenities that it offers.

With the finished product, we managed to convey a lighthearted look while maintaining the integrity of the organization. We made sure that all five websites were highly functional and that users could easily access all necessary content to explore everything Greenville County has to offer.