The Saint Louis Zoo is consistently ranked among the top 10 zoos in the country. It’s easy to see why: its commitment to the care of 16,000+ animals, world-class facilities and habitats, and free admission has cemented it as a central destination within the city of St. Louis.

Our challenge was to develop a versatile publishing platform that could support a wide variety of content needs, including: visitor information, marketing for zoo initiatives, and educational resources covering a wide array of animal species.

Central to our approach was the use of reusable content blocks. By mixing and matching these self-contained layouts, content authors can craft pages tailored to any kind of purpose – whether highlighting park attractions, providing important event details, or explaining what makes a mammal a mammal.

The designs, created by Rogers/Townsend, called for content sections defined by vibrant backgrounds and impactful imagery. In support, content blocks include extensive theming options to offer a range of different styling options. Automated rules are then applied to the final output to ensure that the result is both legible and consistent with the site’s design language.

Beyond its role running a world-class zoo, the Saint Louis Zoo is a hub for research and educational content. The website supports these efforts by organizing a variety of structured content types – from detailed entries on a specific species to a listing of amenities located at a specific section of the park. These content types can be easily related to each other in order to quickly build up detailed destination pages on the site.

Usability and performance were also important considerations, with responsive layouts ensuring seamless access to information across a range of different devices. When working with images, a content editor simply needs to provide an appropriate source asset. An optimized image workflow runs behind the scenes, generating variants to best fit a given layout. The resulting assets are served via a fast content delivery network, in a variety of modern image formats.

Accessibility was another key focus, with the site adhering to industry best practices and confirmed by a third-party audit. Our hope is that the content published on the Saint Louis Zoo site is as free and easy to access as the Zoo itself is.

Working on this site has been more than just another project for us. As residents of St. Louis, the Zoo is part of our community. We pushed ourselves to not only fulfill the project requirements, but to equip the Saint Louis Zoo with the tools it needs to advance its mission.