A park district site rebuilt around booking, reporting and RecTrac

The problem

The site had aged into a brochure while the real work happened in RecTrac. Every program, season and schedule change had to be entered twice, so the website drifted out of date between seasons, and the dated content system underneath meant even a simple content change had to go through IT. Patrons who arrived wanting to register, reserve a shelter, or report a broken piece of playground equipment found a page of text and a phone number, and called the district instead. Staff had no single view of any of it: bookings, repair requests and form submissions all ended up wherever they happened to land.

What we built

We rebuilt the site around what patrons come to do, with a content system underneath everything that staff edit visually and preview live: news, events, parks, facilities, program guides, the homepage and roughly 40 governance pages moved over from the old site are all owned and published by staff, with no developer and no rebuild. The district's live program catalog is copied into the site every hour, and that copy only ever reads from RecTrac, so category pages always show current sessions with no risk to the district's official records. Patrons book birthday parties, rooms, shelters and picnic areas through a step-by-step booking form that checks real availability, report problems through a park issue reporter, and see a public trends board of what's been flagged and fixed. The district's highest-revenue venues each get their own richer showcase page with rates, hours and a direct path to booking, instead of a generic detail page. Behind it all, a staff portal handles password-free sign-in, a bookings calendar, a resource scheduling timeline, repair-ticket assignment, form review, subscriber lists and reporting. The site is also built to keep running when the systems behind it don't. With the content system and the database both disconnected it still runs, with every form falling back to a demo mode, and nearly every public page is prepared in advance, so only the handful of pages that really need a live server are built on request. Automated accessibility checks and a mobile layout check across thirteen screen widths run against every page of the public site and the staff portal. The full news archive of 500-plus articles and hundreds of old web addresses came across with clean redirects, and a nightly one-direction copy flagged anything unclear for a person to review instead of overwriting it.

The outcome

Patrons register, reserve, pay and report issues without calling. Staff stopped maintaining the same information in two places and now publish news, events and governance pages themselves, the same day, with no developer involved. The RecTrac copy only ever reads, so the site can show live program data with no chance of changing anything in the district's official records. Nothing from the old site was lost in the move: every old web address redirects cleanly, and the changeover ran on a nightly copy rather than one big switch on a single day. And because the site keeps running even when one of the systems behind it is down, an outage elsewhere in the district's systems no longer takes the public website down with it.