Case Study

Minneapolis is known for its beautiful parks. The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board needed a beautiful website to match.

Screenshot of Minneapolis Parks website.
Minneapolis Parks Logo

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) is an independent park district that owns, maintains, and programs activities in public parks in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The park system has been called the best-designed and best-maintained in America. Its mission is to permanently preserve, protect, maintain, improve, and enhance Minneapolis’ natural resources, parkland, and recreational opportunities for current and future generations. 

Our Role

  • WordPress Website Redesign
  • Reporting & Analytics
  • Support & Hosting

The Challenge:

The Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board was in a challenging situation when they started their journey to a new website, and they were searching for a realistic and practical solution. The backbone of their website, the content management system (CMS), was getting sunsetted by their agency partner.

This meant it would no longer be usable for them, so they had a decision to make. MPRB needed to decide whether to move onto a new CMS with their former agency partner or transition to a new partner. They ultimately went with the latter of the two options and partnered with ArcStone for a completely new website project. We recommended that the organization go with a WordPress site, an open-source approach.

Old Minneapolis Parks Website

Our Approach

Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board engaged with ArcStone to help design, develop, and host a WordPress site.

They approached us with a challenging issue and a tight deadline, but we worked together to get them an outstanding result they would be happy with.

The ArcStone and MPRB teams collaborated closely to migrate hundreds of pages to the new website and meet their aggressive deadline. Beyond migrating off the old CMS, their main goal for the design was to make it easy for their users to find information about activities, events, and essential park news.

New Minneapolis Parks website homepage.
New Minneapolis Parks website parks page.

Year Over Year Results

Following the launch of the new website, the site saw increased organic traffic by 21% by leveraging the SEO-friendly WordPress platform. Additionally, user sessions increased by 14%, and the site’s e-commerce goals converted to 189% higher over two years. The Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board has continued to work with ArcStone to improve the website and provide in-depth reporting for its board. 

21% Increase

Organic traffic to the new website increased by seventeen percent due to better SEO optimizations.

189% Increase

Conversion goals increased by almost two hundred percent due to better CTAs and site navigation.

14% Increase

User sessions increased because visitors found the new site faster and easier to use.