Overview
The Liberty Trail explores South Carolina’s pivotal role in the American Revolution from 1775 to 1782. Featuring engaging photography and video from historic locations, the website is an essential guide for any history lover. It offers a variety of new resources including itineraries, listings of outdoor activities, events and museums, and a blog highlighting land preservation, new research and archeology. In addition, the Liberty Trail app is designed for on-the-go learning to help visitors of all ages immerse in the struggles that shaped America’s independence through battle descriptions, biographies, and on-site interpretations. For this project, the Interactive Knowledge team identified and prioritized the project goals, developed a full content strategy and UX design, and implemented a new, engaging site in under one year.
The Goals
- Build a tourist-focused site highlighting historic sites and activities that help tell the story of America’s Independence.
- Provide a variety of activities, events and experiences to assist users in planning their Liberty Trail excursions.
- Build an intuitive backend that allows for client updates, as well as API integration for news, events and blog posts.
The IK Approach
The IK team faced the challenge of designing a site that would engage the modern tourist industry while traditionally catering to an older, history-focused audience. By blending historical resources with contemporary activities and experiences, the site now appeals to a broader audience, allowing users to personalize their exploration based on their unique interests.
Results
Aside from the practical and useful information The Liberty Trail website provides, the site builds excitement about exploring those South Carolina sites that played a pivotal role in America’s independence.
“Our expanded web presence for The Liberty Trail gave us the opportunity to explore creating a website about history that was “travel forward.” It’s an experience that offers a variety of new resources including itineraries, listings of outdoor activities, events and museums, and a blog highlighting land preservation, new research and archeology. Interactive Knowledge’s experience with building shared content management systems sets The Liberty Trail up to be a hub for collaboration with partners in South Carolina and beyond. The new site now gives us a way to easily add a variety of content and explore all the wonderful history available on the Trail. The Interactive Knowledge team were great partners in realizing our goals on-time, on-budget, and with much delight.”
Lawrence Swiader
Chief Digital Officer
Some of the site’s features include:
- Interactive maps help users plan their visit with and search by activity, location or experience type
- Beautiful video and photography that brings to life the historic sites, helping visitors to envision themselves at these places and encouraging them to visit
- Design that features stories and historic interest in parallel with visitor information in a way that feels complementary and not disjointed
- Clear taxonomy and site navigation that highlights content for different interests and user needs
- API integration keeps news and events timely for users
- Robust Drupal 10 backend
- Fully responsive and mobile-friendly site
- Site compliant with WCAG 2.1 standards