Features Overview

• Project Summary: “Can you recommend a good hike in Boulder?” Since I was regularly answering this question, and had hard drives full of relevant photographs, I decided to create a website to help people find good hikes in Boulder, Colorado. The site allows users to filter based on a variety of criteria for their hike, including dog access, seasonal preference, and difficulty.

• My Role: Designed and created the website using Wordpress and customizing a theme for visual design and to allow filtering. My goal was to test the theory that good content could result in good SEO without all the tricks SEO professionals preach about. I proved that to be true, at least for this niche. At it’s peak, it averaged 40k pageviews/month during Spring, Summer and Fall.

• Biggest Challenge: the biggest challenge was learning enough PHP to hack the wordpress theme into doing what I wanted.

• Site was retired in 2020 due to downgrading by Google’s AMP system. Did not have the time to redesign to meet their mobile guidelines. Traffic had diminished by over 90% with this Google downgrade.