Nobody noticed. That was the assignment.

Stone Mountain Park is one of the most visited attractions in Georgia, and its website runs the operation: tickets, memberships, park hours, a hundred-odd attractions and events, all of it changing daily. When the park’s digital operations changed hands, the site couldn’t come along. It lived on the outgoing operator’s Umbraco platform, on their infrastructure, and the handover clock was already running.

The handoff was a content tree, a few batches of exported data, and the site’s public API. No codebase, no CMS access, no database. The part that mattered most, how all of it actually worked, we learned from the outside: one API call at a time, in Postman, documenting an 83-field data model the way a naturalist documents a new species.

And the brief had one more constraint: visitors shouldn’t notice. Same design, same URLs, same park. This wasn’t a redesign. It was a transplant with the patient awake.

The build started December 7. We mapped and rebuilt roughly 200 pages and 100 activities in WordPress, matching the existing design deliberately, down to the templates.

The hard part was the schedule engine, because a park is a schedule wearing a website. Every attraction keeps its own hours, every day is different, and festivals layer on top. We rebuilt it as an Activities system on Events Calendar Pro with a utility that mass-generates events for any set of activities, a park-hours table the staff writes once for the year that automatically caps selected attractions’ hours, per-activity rules for the operating-hours box, and configurable closed behavior. Staff manage a season from one screen instead of a thousand entries.

Underneath the ad-hoc design, we built the system it never had: a library of reusable block patterns, so every page editors assemble comes out consistent without changing how anything looks.

The rest was the quiet carpentry that makes a migration hold: eleven forms rebuilt, seventeen third-party scripts audited and re-homed, and the old URLs preserved so nobody’s bookmark broke.

The new site went live in mid-February, ten weeks after the first build day, two weeks ahead of the deadline, with the holidays in the middle. Traffic didn’t flinch: comparing the same eight months before and after, sessions grew 14 percent in the new site’s first year.

And launch was the start, not the finish. In the years since, the platform has grown with the park: forms moved off Mailchimp and onto Microsoft Dynamics, [Osano consent management, full Spanish translation, site-wide alerts,] a mobile nav rebuilt for people standing in a parking lot, and a membership walkthrough that gets a family from couch to front gate in eight steps, no printed card. Park staff run hours, events, and alerts themselves, and we still maintain and extend the platform today.

Nothing changed. Everything did.