Since 2003, the Elizabeth River Trail has connected segments of Norfolk’s working waterfront with scenic routes past historic landmarks, local gems, and beautiful parks highlighting the diversity of Norfolk and providing a riverfront sanctuary amongst the urban energy of our City. The trail connects 28 unique neighborhoods and will expand East continuing along the Elizabeth River, allowing even more neighborhoods to be within a five-minute walk of the Trail. Their goal is to create the most connected, accessible and resilient riverfront trail in the country.

Elizabeth River Trail (ERT) came to us through the Create/Captivate website. Their Executive Director, Kindra Greene, reached out and asked if we would be interested in submitting and RFP for their website redesign, and we accepted. After a couple meetings and our proposal submission, we were selected as the winner!

The website redesign team at ERT had already outlined a wireframe for the new build and carried a vision of a site that would both represent the progress they’ve made so far as well as help them continue to grow and expand for many years to come. They also needed a site that was extremely easy to manage and update themselves so they did not have to be dependent on a third party for minor changes.

As we started in on the wireframe we realized things needed to grow quite a bit, so we adapted. The entire design process ended up being a perfect example of why remaining flexible with creative projects is so crucial—everyone involved with this project had to pivot and adjust their needs and expectations more than once, but clear and consistent communication made those fluctuations smooth rather than frustrating. We were very fortunate to find such amazing clients in Kindra and later on Morgan Willett, their Assistant Director who came on board partway through the project.

Today ERT is a retainer client for website maintenance and updates, and we’ve discussed potential for additional projects in the coming year. Their website redesign project resulted in the largest website we’ve ever built, and included unique features like QR codes that link to their trailhead pages, a custom-built Google Map of the trail, and a branded event calendar. It was incredibly fun to build this site and we look forward to a long-lasting relationship with the entire ERT team.