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The Parks Channel

Building a Community around US National Parks

Expertise

Design & Development

Platforms

Web

Industry

Lifestyle

The Client

Founded in 2021 by Chris Hoelzl and Charles Poe, both with media backgrounds and a love for nature and history, the Parks Channel’s mission is to encourage Americans to discover and appreciate their national parks through inspiring videos. They aim to become a go-to platform to explore the beauty of nature and historic monuments. The top-notch, informative videos, posted by content creators are the core of the platform.

The Challenge

Creating a sense of community around natural spaces is the main goal of the platform. Content creators can share their stories, tips, and experiences with others. By doing so, they inspire and motivate fellow adventurers to explore the beauty of America’s national parks, even if just from home. We helped the Parks Channel by building their MVP platform with a few key features: an interactive map, video player, and trip planner tool.

The core value of the Parks Channel is to connect like-minded individuals, build community, and inspire them to explore new parks through video content.

The map - the heart of the platform

At the heart of the Parks Channel platform is an interactive map. We integrated with MapBox and created stunning, customized map visuals in MapBox Studio. With its user-friendly interface, the map provides a bird's eye view of all the user-generated videos from specific locations. This feature allows users to discover national parks in a whole new way. With the geosearch function, users can browse videos from different locations and explore new landscapes all over the USA.

You won’t forget the sunscreen

The planner tool is an extremely useful feature for those preparing for a new adventure. The feature generates a packing checklist based on the destination and planned activities. Users can save their checklists and also buy items they need from affiliate links.

Your next trip has just become easier - gain knowledge from the travelers' community, watch videos, and save checklists with all things you need to explore America’s heritage.

Social Media-like Features

In the creator’s panel users can create profiles, post videos, keep track of how many parks they visited, and save their planner checklists. The main focus of the video posting feature was to simplify the process as much as possible. The UI Design reflects the Parks Channel green branding, and the play button was very much inspired by their logo.

Top-Notch Content Curation thanks to the Admin panel

The founders placed great emphasis on providing only high-quality and handpicked content. That’s why the admin panel focuses on managing, approving, and publishing user-generated content. Other features include user management, park information management, and predefined planner checklists.

The EL Passion team was very organized in managing the project and always delivered features on time. They were smart, enthusiastic, and eager to over-deliver on targets. Despite cultural differences between the US and Poland, they were a pleasure to work with.

Charles Poe

Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer
at the Parks Channel

Tools

TypeScript
React
Next.js
NestJS
AWS
Figma

Deliverables

Full design & development of the platform
Functional admin and creator panel with social-media-like features
Interactive, accessible map as the core of the website
Integrations with third-party providers: Mapbox, Algolia, imgix, and JW Player helping users explore America's treasures

Maybe it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

We’re available for new projects.

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