It has been 15 years, starting in a legendary winter back in 2002, that QParks has literally shaped the Alps and still does – more stoked than ever. The crew, which has grown up to 200 women and men by now, has designed and built more than 100 snow parks over the years. In case you didn’t know yet: Quality Snowparks stands for a lot more than planting first class setups into the snow.
From the very beginning, the QParks credo was “For Freestyle”. That was the motor for hundreds of events, thousands of shootings, which in turn resulted in as many video edits and an amount of photos, which moves towards a million. These shoots usually didn’t star famous riders, but rather showed locals and ambitious rookies, of which some already made it onto the international stage. This, however, brings along numerous additional challenges in our digital age: Where and how should these heaps of content be presented? This has always been a crucial issue at QParks, which is discussed anew after each and every season.
Over time, qparks.com has undergone various facelifts or entire redesigns, in order to stay an innovative platform for the local freestyle scene. After all, freestyle doesn’t stop at the bottom of the park, but accompanies our daily lives – especially on our smartphones.
Moritz Klammer, park designer at Snowpark Schöneben emphasizes why an up-to-date web-appearance is essential: “So, social media and a proper online-presence are very important to me. It’s important to me that the park reaches the entire surrounding community and the ones who are interested in the sport.”
Reaching out to the community, connecting it and thus building up the base of freestyle in Europe – These are the goals, QParks has sought since its very foundation. In order to fulfill this mission online as well, the “web-shapers” have fiddled and tinkered for months and the results are quite sturdy:
Mobile first. The technical demands of a website have changed a lot, because the younger audience almost exclusively surfs the web via their smartphones. The designers at QParks had to react to these developments in particular. Hence, there are already 18 QParks offering mobile apps for Android and iOS providing the shred-heads with loads of important info on the respective snow park. However, the content from the QParks-freestyle-universe can only be displayed in its entirety on the qparks.com website. These are the alterations of the new page in detail:
Since the requirements for a site being used on a mobile device are quite special, the design is customized even more to a life on the road. This means in detail that the user interface has been optimized for touchscreens but works perfectly fine on PC and Mac too – which has already proven successful for some new park-pages. Severin Willmann, local at badenova Snowpark Feldberg, is happy about the redesigned website of his homebase: “I think it’s great! The handling is easy and the layout looks amazing!”
However, the refurbished qparks.com is not just pretty to look at, but offers a bunch of new features too. And these are of course well adjusted to the freestyle scene.
The messageboard serves as a platform for the park scene in order to connect one another, arrange park sessions or to share experiences. Messageboards already exist within the new mobile apps and on numerous new QParks park websites. The messageboard of qparks.com bundles up all these posts and presents them entirely. Here it works just like on the park websites. You can write posts, upload pics and videos and organize car pools to parks for example.
The Ridercorner is the place, where the boys and girls of the freestyle scene are able to show their riding. All shred-heads can create profiles with photo, short description and upload their coolest shots and edits from the QParks, to spread them within the community.
The event calendar offers a full overview of all QParks events. You want to know when and where QParks Tour Stops or Girls Shred Sessions are going down? Find out here!
The Tell-a-Shaper is to be found in the dashboard and allows you to directly contact the QParks crew. Here you are able for example, to ask questions about parks or events, give suggestions or simply express praise.