Project Background

West Duwamish Greenbelt Trails (WDGT) is a non-profit organization dedicated to conservation advocacy in the West Duwamish Greenbelt, Seattle’s largest continuous forest.

WDGT’s goal is to activate this space by creating awareness of the greenbelt, educating the community on the history of the land and people, and promoting the use of its trails.

A unique complexity to this project is both the breadth and depth of the information to be hosted, and I approached the design with a goal of making this information visible and accessible with just a couple clicks without compromising the depth of the coverage.

Visit wdgtrails.org

Project Approach

I started from scratch with a vanilla Wordpress install and started with a homepage that will let a mobile visitor quickly scroll and understand what the website has to offer with quick links to access a map of the space.

Then I approached each page as if it were a self-contained single-page website for that specific topic.

About has the relevant information about the WDGT organization itself.

Trails has information about how to access the map along with embedded videos of virgual hikes and nature walks.

History is a self-contained blog feed of articles using a post template that serves other history articles at the bottom to allow users to continue reading up on history instead of seeing a mix of all of the other blog categories. Nature and News offer the same self-contained blog feed format.

Photos features a nice feed that breaks images out into categories via filter buttons without requiring users to click into child pages.

And finally, Get Involved features calls-to-action for engaging with volunteer opportunities, submitting photos, and joining guided hikes.

Whether the user needs to quickly access the map after scanning a QR code on the trail or is sitting down at their computer at home browsing history articles, the goal is to deliver the most frictionless experience possible and to minimize the number of clicks or scrolling required to access any piece of information.

I used a minimalist approach to development that relies on core Wordpress functionality and a very limited set of plugins that expand this core functionality so that the website can run long-term and survive automatic updates and plugin updates and expiration without breaking.