City Parks Alliance

Here’s how Mightybytes helped City Parks Alliance create an engaging and resilient online presence that improves both organizational initiatives and internal workflows.

City Parks Alliance is a membership-based organization serving urban parks leaders in cities across the United States. They hired Mightybytes to redesign their online presence.

At the time, City Parks Alliance managed three separate websites:

1. The main City Parks Alliance website, which the organization used to manage content and memberships,
2. Greater & Greener, a website for their biennial city parks conference,
3. Mayors for Parks, a bipartisan coalition advocating at the federal level to increase investment in urban parks.

Aging technology infrastructure and several years of content updates meant the site didn’t quite serve either City Parks Alliance or its members as it once had. Understanding this, the organization initially created the following goals for this initiative:

• Merge three web properties into a single site for easier management and improved brand consistency.
• Make information easier to find for members and non-members alike.
• Improve core functionality and make the site easier to manage and maintain over time.

To achieve these goals, City Parks Alliance needed a flexible partner to help them create a sustainable, long-term solution that the organization could grow with.

A collaborative product roadmapping process helped stakeholders build consensus on project specifications, including features, timeline, budget, member needs, business goals, and so on. This enabled City Parks Alliance to raise funds for the project.

To facilitate a shared vision, we revised the initial list of goals with more specificity:

1. Bring Greater & Greener and Mayors for Parks sites under the main association website.
2. Migrate the website to Mightybytes’ hosting partner to save money and give the organization more control over infrastructure.
3. Create a simpler, more reliable membership verification process for gated content.
4. Refine the main navigation, utilizing tree testing to validate or refute choices.
5. Rebuild Greater & Greener conference content, leveraging a third-party API to automate as much of the process as possible. 

By refining our collective project goals, and building consensus on the desired feature set to best support City Parks Alliance’s members, we co-created a robust roadmap that served as a blueprint for the project. Once funding was secured, we could start designing a meaningful user experience and building out site infrastructure and components.

With a clear but flexible roadmap in place, we began creating the components necessary for a successful launch.

Experience Design

The roadmap provided a flexible guide with which to create a meaningful experience for City Parks Alliance users. To achieve this, Mightybytes designed the following deliverables:

• Wireframes & design comps for key pages
• Sitemap & new navigation structure
• Component designs for custom blocks, resources and publications, programs, and conference requirements
• Custom layouts for internal reports and publications

Plus, to validate whether new, proposed navigation would help users find what they need, we conducted tree tests with both current members and anonymous participants screened to match the organization’s target stakeholders.

Finally, all deliverables adhered to specific brand guidelines for each of the three web properties.

Feature Development

As design deliverables were approved, our teams set to the task of building out the features necessary for a successful project, including:

• Custom block library with flexible branding options to allow the Alliance’s team to create unique page layouts with key functions
• Single Sign-On (SSO) for gated content and third-party member portal access
• Programs and event listings, integrated with two separate platforms
• Online library for member-exclusive resources

Additionally, we implemented improved conference scheduling and program features that included:

• The ability to add sessions to a list of favorites that can be shared or printed
• Features like identifying session schedule conflicts and registration capacity
• Responsive design to work across devices and platforms

Next, we created a detailed instruction manual to help website administrators and content editors more easily navigate their new tools.

Finally, as with all our projects, the website also adhered to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines specifications at Level AA to support people with physical and cognitive disabilities who may use assistive technologies.

We worked with City Parks Alliance and their third-party membership portal platform developer to define a launch date for both environments. After testing and quality assurance, we launched the new City Parks Alliance website in early January 2026.

The new site accomplished many of City Parks Alliance’s feature requests, including:

• Simple member access to gated content and exclusive events validated through a Single Sign-On (SSO) process,
• Enable site visitors to preview gated content,
• Consolidate three separate sites into the main website, reducing content-management complexity and establishing a shared design language across initiatives,
• Updated layouts with tooltips for conference price tiers and membership benefits, which help site users more easily find what they need to complete important tasks,
• Migrate the event management platform API from SOAP to REST to auto-sync the website so admins no longer need to edit content in two different places.

Post-launch, we’re working with the City Parks Alliance team to support Greater & Greener, provide more actionable analytics and reporting insights, and continue optimizing the site for search engines, AI Overviews, and to improve conversions.

This was a big project spanning many months with stakeholders from multiple organizations. Learning was continuous throughout. Our flexible process enabled us to pivot or otherwise adjust our approach as needed to accommodate what we learned along the way.

More importantly, trust, good collaboration, and clear communication in the service of shared, long-term goals enabled a successful launch.

City Parks Alliance now has a robust set of tools to help them more effectively manage member needs and support organizational growth. We look forward to continue helping them build long-term success.