Exploring nature made easy

Colorado Parks & Wildlife needed a full site redesign and wanted to be able to make content updates more easily. Their current site lacked the beauty that the parks and wildlife had to offer, was confusing and inaccessible for users, and was difficult for content administrators to update.

I joined this project on the frontend development team, implementing the new design system within a Drupal CMS environment. We advised the client to add Acquia Site Studio on top of the Drupal site to be able to have a robust component library and more easily manageable templates.

Within Drupal, I built both static and dynamic content. This involved setting up views, custom styles, custom modules (PHP) and templates (twig), content types, and components. For each component, I created both the visual and functional portion of the component as well as the administrative form needed to be able to populate the component with the necessary data. We used ddev to manage our local instances of the site and push code to a git repository for a standard code review and testing process. I also was in charge of ensuring the site passed our accessibility, SEO, and performance standards, using Lighthouse to run automatic tests.

Our new CMS system and component library makes it easy for the client to keep their site up to date in terms of content and design. Their site now mirrors the beauty of their state parks while giving users an easy to navigate interface, making it intuitive to find events, parks, and hunting information.