Rexburg-Madison Airport

Rexburg-Madison County Airport is the regional airport for Eastern Idaho — the gateway to Yellowstone, the Tetons and the Snake River Valley. It's also ten minutes from where I live, which made this one personal.

Public-sector sites have a structural problem commercial sites usually don't: several unrelated audiences arrive at the same front door. Travelers want visitor information. Pilots want operational detail — fuel, services, runway and field information. Tenants and local businesses want something else again. None of them care about the other two, and all of them are annoyed by having to filter.

You can read the resolution straight off the navigation. Fuel services, hangars and pilot information for the people flying in. Training and maintenance for tenants and the businesses on the field. A visitor section and news for everybody else. Eight destinations in total — which is the point: a small site where every item earns its place is far more useful than a large one where the useful things are buried.

Worth knowing too that the field is KRXE, and a pilot planning a stop searches that identifier, not the airport’s full name. Public infrastructure often has this problem — the official name and the name people actually use are different, and usually only one of them is on the website.

Built from scratch, treating information architecture as the design problem itself. Each audience gets a clear, short path from the front page to what they came for, without the others' content in the way.

Clarity over decoration. A pilot checking fuel availability isn't there for an experience — they want a fact, quickly, possibly on a phone in a hangar. The design gets out of the way of the information, which for public infrastructure is the correct instinct.

Structured so the airport's staff can keep operational details current themselves. Out-of-date information on a public-sector site is worse than a plain one, because people act on it.

Weight was a design constraint, not an afterthought. A pilot checking fuel from the ramp is on whatever signal the field has, which in Eastern Idaho isn't much. The home page is a fraction of the size of a typical business site, and that's the point.

Public information that people can actually find, for an organization where being findable is the whole point of having a website.

This one also matters locally. It's the airport for my own community, and it's the kind of work where doing it properly has a visible effect on people I might run into at the store. It's one of five Rexburg businesses on this site.

No performance figures are claimed here either. The airport is a public body and I have no analytics access to it. What can be verified is the structure — open the site and count how many steps it takes a pilot to reach fuel information, which is the thing this build should actually be judged on.