Finger Lakes Trail

Website Development & Design
Site Architecture
Shopping Cart
2016 to present

The Organization

Founded in 1962, The Finger Lakes Trail Conference supports itself with over 1,400 individual and family memberships. It’s very impressive. Approximately one quarter of these members operate the organization and its programs as volunteers. They literally build and maintain the trail system via various groups, affiliate organizations and combined efforts.

The trail system covers some of the most gorgeous land in New York. It’s over 950 miles in length starting from Pennsylvania-New York border to Catskill Forest Preserve. There are branches to Niagara Falls, Genesee River Valley, central Finger Lakes and more scenic areas too plentiful to list here.

It was a special thrill for Fat Eyes to be engaged for this large project because Doug Anderson (Fat Eyes co-founder/owner) has a personal connection to the Finger Lakes from childhood having grown up in Central New York. Particularly Skaneateles Lake where Doug spent idyllic summer days in a canoe. Just picture he and his 2 friends out at 6am in their boyish pajamas floating sleepily, in the early morning fog but not before their daily feeding of Kraft caramels to the raccoons on the shore….

The Mission of the Finger Lakes Trail in their own words,

“…to build, protect, enhance, and promote a continuous footpath across New York State. Forever!”

What We Did & Why

The target audience for FLTC is comprised of multiple audience groups such as the general public, FLTC members, content editors (for example, Trail Maintainers), Board of Manager members. At the same time they hope to attract the younger audience in order to carry on the organization’s mission.

It was our mission to develop a new website that was thoughtfully redesigned, reconstructed, brought up to date and purposed specifically to a positive user experience. We worked with them on re-organizing the content of their previous website which was outdated and needed fresh eyes. We collaborated on creating a new site structure that would better serve their membership and help to attract new members through ease of use.

The site is accessed by Mobile users out in the field and our aim was to offer a more practical platform for those folks. This included developing a new online store for merchandise and delivery of maps to hikers.

It will be a platform for their video content, integrate easily with social media, have a blog (s), and updated e‐commerce engine. Our collective goal is to make it a great boon to the organization.