Nature Everywhere Waukegan brings local partners together, from schools and nonprofits to the city government, so that everyone in Waukegan, Illinois has safe, welcoming access to green and blue spaces. It carries forward an initiative of the Children & Nature Network, the national nonprofit that hired us in the spring of 2026 to build the initiative’s website.
The situation
The initiative needed a home of its own, separate from the national network’s site and written for Waukegan families. Much of the community is Latino, so the site had to work in Spanish as well as English.
It also had a firm date. The partners were hosting a community event in late June and wanted to send people to the site that weekend.
Kelly McManus, the network’s creative director, built the brand and designed the home page and one inner page as templates. Our job was to turn them into a working Squarespace site and carry the same feel through every page after them.
Building from the brand
We chose Squarespace so the network’s own team could keep the site current after handoff. Photos sit under a deep teal wash, with orange and green leaf shapes from Kelly’s brand at the edges, and the home page headline cycles through what Waukegan will do outdoors: play, grow, heal, connect and thrive.
The Benefits and Strategies pages share a structure, numbered points beside photos, and in review they read too much alike. So we mirrored one layout against the other and gave each page its own header, and now you can tell where you are at a glance.
The Map page explains each data layer behind the initiative’s priorities in plain language, with one question per layer and a legend that runs from lower to highest need. The interactive census map itself comes from a mySidewalk report, embedded below the explanation.
Launch week
Get Involved offers four ways in, from joining a local event to paid youth jobs, and we wrote the copy for the youth employment card. The partners’ list of upcoming events downloads as a PDF in English and Spanish.
For the rest of the site, we connected Weglot, which plugs straight into Squarespace, so every page switches to Spanish from the header. The site went live on June 18, two days before the event.
Growing with the initiative
The team has come back each time the initiative has added something. In September we built an Events page, where partners’ workdays and workshops link straight to registration, and a Partners page with each organization’s story.
In October came Workforce Development, a page of nature-centered careers, paid summer internships, job training and volunteer roles. We built every listing with Squarespace’s own list sections, so the team adds and removes openings without touching code.
The outcome
After launch we transferred the site to the network and walked the team through editing it themselves. Since then it’s grown by three pages, and each one is built so the people running the initiative can keep it up to date.