The Skokie Park District won first prize for its website today at the Illinois Park & Recreation Association's Agency Showcase competition.

The district also won an award in IPRA's Give Us Your Best Shot photo contest, with Scott Walker’s photo entitled “Beginning Ballers” winning first prize in the sports category.

After nearly two years of community and staff input, a commissioned professional survey, and a large, complicated building project conceived and executed by numerous district staff and Americaeagle.com, the district’s new website, still found at www.skokieparks.org went live in February 2019, offering Skokie residents more intuitive navigation and an enhanced online experience.

The site now features an improved registration splash page, a more robust event calendar, a cleaner look, a responsive site, and most importantly –– program pages that link directly into the district’s registration system.

The old 2011 site was one of the first Illinois park district sites to feature integration with its companion registration site. The new award-winning site takes that feature a step farther, with live individual class sections now appearing on the website itself, leaving users only one click away from finding specific program information or registering for classes.

The new site, targeted for Skokie residents and regional users of the district’s major revenue facilities, also features a more efficient site search, a language translator for the more than 90 languages spoken in Skokie, extra information on facility page tabs, mapping by amenities and programs, and live social media tabs on the site’s homepage.

The district's marketing department has won 18 state design and publication awards since 2004.​ The professionally-judged Illinois Park & Recreation Association's 'Agency Showcase' competition, held at the industry's annual state conference in Chicago, spotlights creative ideas in marketing and communication.