American Trails website gets new look, easier navigation

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Our website has a whole new lookÑ new graphics, a better system of navigation, and a clean design. You'll find hundreds of pages of resources, trail group contacts, news, jobs, articles, studies, and a nationwide calendar. Discover a vast new world of trails and greenways at www.AmericanTrails.org. The website was launched in 1996 with a few pages and some titles. We simply started adding topics and pages and big new sections, like "America's Trails State by State."

In recent years we have also started hosting the websites of the National Trails Training Partnership and the National Recreation Trails Program. As a result the whole electronic edifice was growing in all different directions and increasingly hard to navigate. We had several goals for updating the site:

• a look that conveys more of a sense of the outdoors
• ways to use photos more effectively
• standard ways to move from page to page
• clear graphics and icons that aid in navigation
• better ways to search the site, like "pull-down" menus
• the ability to efficiently add content to the site
• sticking to simple technology and a reasonably fast loading time for pages

To accomplish the update we hired a web designer who is talented artistically as well as an expert in Web technology. Cory Maylett's career as a designer has spanned more than 20 years, including design and art direction for magazines, newspapers, books, websites, corporate identity programs, and multimedia projects. Cory also has a deep-rooted appreciation of the outdoors, and enthusiasm for backpacking, hiking, and mountain biking. He is currently finishing up an extensive overhaul of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources website: www.wildlife.utah.gov. You can see more of Cory's work at www.maylett.net.

Visit American Trails at www.AmericanTrails.org.

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