Iditarod Historic Trail Alliance — website redesign prototypes

We would rather show you how we think than describe it. Start with the public site, but if you only have ten minutes, open the operations console — it answers the question your RFP cares most about, which is whether one person at the Alliance can keep this site current after we leave.

The public site

Eleven views · what a visitor sees

The redesigned iditarod100.org, built on your Attachment 1 sitemap. The homepage carries the visual story you asked for — locations, uses, history and communities — around a schematic of the route from Seward to Nome.

Resources — your archive with live filtering, and file type, size and accessibility status shown before the click
Accessibility — five things you can test yourself in two minutes, plus the measured contrast of the real palette
Show RFP notes — the button in the top bar maps every design decision to the requirement it answers

Open the site

The operations console

Nine screens · what your editor sees

Project goal four in your RFP is a content management system internal staff find intuitive. Every vendor will claim that, so here is the screen. This is the administration experience we would configure, not a stock dashboard.

Document archive — your archive as a live triage board, each file tracked to a named accessibility outcome. Totals are our October 31 count; individual titles are a representative sample, not the reconciled inventory
Dashboard — the overdue items come from your current site: the events page last updated June 2020, the empty Galena page, the patch still under development
Contacts — consent recorded with its source and date, so a purchase never quietly becomes a newsletter subscription

Open the console

Two visual directions

Side by side · the choice you would make in January

Section 4.3 asks for design concepts. Our plan presents two homepage directions in January; here they are in November, so the conversation can start before the contract.

Trail Survey — cartographic and restrained, works without photography
Roadhouse Archive — editorial and photographic, built for donors and first-time visitors
A plain comparison of what each one asks of you to keep running

Compare the directions

Your sitemap, built

All 31 nodes · Attachment 1, with our working-out shown

Your own map, rendered as the navigation we would build. Select any node to see the page type it becomes, where its content comes from, and what we flagged while reading it.

Three duplicate nodes found — and how we would resolve them
Project Jukebox placed properly, with the UAF redesign risk planned around
Thirty-one nodes resolving to eight reusable page types

Walk the sitemap

One editor, one Tuesday

Six steps · the answer to “can two people run this?”

A staff editor adds a gateway community from scratch and a board reviewer publishes it. The content model, the permissions and the review workflow, shown in use rather than described.

Alternative text enforced at entry — a hard stop, not a warning
Roles enforced on the server, not by hiding buttons
What the dashboard looks like eighteen months after launch

Follow the workflow

What these prototypes are, and are not

Content is illustrative, drawn from your current site and public materials, and is here to show structure and behavior rather than to propose finished copy. We have deliberately not drafted Alaska Native history or community narratives, and we have not placed stock photography of Alaska — image areas are marked rather than faked.

Historical interpretation, community representation and image rights would be written or approved by the Alliance and its partners. We build the structure; you own what goes in it.