Colorado Parks & Wildlife: A Site Built for Peak Traffic | Whereoware

Challenge

CPW’s legacy website had become increasingly difficult to navigate and maintain. Built on SharePoint and managed by a wide network of internal contributors, the site had naturally grown to thousands of pages, making consistency, governance, and structure hard to maintain.

Visitors couldn’t easily find what they needed and internal teams had limited tools to manage content efficiently, especially during high-traffic seasons.

Key issues included:

A complex and varied audience—residents, visitors, hunters, anglers, hikers, educators, students, and conservationists—each with different needs and expectations
A rigid CMS that made content updates time-intensive and error-prone
No system of governance across teams managing content
Difficulty guiding users to key transactions like hunting license sales or event registration
A lack of accessibility compliance, creating friction for many users

While personalization wasn’t a primary focus for this phase, the groundwork is in place—through component design, templated content, and user research—to support more tailored experiences over time.

Project Goals

The website rebuild was designed to directly support CPW’s wider objective of enhancing service to the public, addressing current and future challenges, and strengthening stewardship of parks and wildlife balanced with outdoor recreation.

To achieve this, the project focused on:

Streamline publishing so internal teams can move faster and reduce errors
Improve navigation to help users access critical services and information more easily
Deliver a fully accessible, responsive site that performs reliably across devices and regions

Industry

Public Sector

1. Smarter Content Management

We created a modular design system that made it easy for contributors across departments to build pages using reusable, brand-aligned components. Roles, permissions, and publishing workflows gave teams autonomy to move quickly while governance controls kept content consistent and secure.

2. Streamlined Navigation and Search

The navigation was rebuilt from the ground up, informed by focused user validation, interviews, and competitive research. We tested key pages for layout and navigation, collecting targeted feedback that shaped design decisions and surfaced ideas for future improvements. We clarified user pathways and reorganized content to help visitors find what they need faster, including streamlined access to high-value transactional pages for licenses, permits, and events.

We also refreshed the visual design and brought CPW’s brand forward with a cleaner, more modern interface—one that performs well on all devices and supports a more intuitive, mobile-friendly experience for every user.

3. Accessibility at the Core

From the beginning, the site was designed to be accessible to everyone. We tested with screen readers, used semantic markup, ensured contrast compliance, and trained CPW’s content creators on how to maintain accessibility standards moving forward.

4. Scalable Governance

We implemented a governance framework that made it possible for park staff and department teams to manage their own pages and alerts without compromising the quality or functionality of the site. That included external integrations, language support, and built-in publication controls.

The WOW Factor!

Shortly after launch, the site got its first real stress test: Colorado’s Big Game Draw,
a high-traffic annual event tied directly to CPW’s funding model.

In just one day, the Big Game page saw 40,000+ visitors. The draw ended with a record-breaking 837,503 license applications while the site held steady, giving applicants the information to complete their CPWShop applications smoothly.
And not a single hiccup. No crashes, no slowdowns, no emergency calls.

The CPW team called it one of the smoothest events they’ve run.