The Challenge
The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks (MDWFP) works under state statute to conserve, develop, and protect Mississippi’s natural resources and provide outdoor recreation opportunities. Organized into six bureaus, the agency oversees Law Enforcement, Freshwater Fisheries, the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science (MMNS), State Parks, Support Services, and Wildlife. To best serve this diverse audience, the MDWFP put out an RFP for a vendor to develop a new, fully functional public website that meets user needs, functions seamlessly, and provides a robust user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). They sought a vendor that could manage everything from discovery and user-centered design, to content migration and final deployment and training.
Our Approach
Partnering with Olympia, WA based Treinen Associates, our team worked through an extensive discovery phase, developing a detailed project plan that included a clear timeline, project milestones, and success metrics. Leveraging our growing experience working in the conservation and outdoor recreation field, our design phase involved significant user research, development of numerous target user personas, a full content audit, wireframes of all major page templates and ultimately high-fidelity design comps and a style guide to support implementation. The subsequent development effort undertook migration from the Department’s Umbraco CMS to a new Drupal 10 instance. GWW also supported the content lift, working with the MDWFP team to provide extensive training for content managers, as well as marketing research and analytics education.
The Result
The comprehensive new website is tailored to MDWFP’s needs with seamless navigation, enhanced user experience, and SEO optimization. The Drupal CMS provides significantly greater content control for non-technical users, freeing up MDWFP’s own developers to focus on other tasks. Mississippians can now access a host of new tools to discover the state’s extensive network of parks and wildlife management areas, as well hunting and fishing resources and other educational materials.
