We launched a new website for Wollman Rink in Central Park

The new wollmanrinknyc.com went live on October 27, 2026, the day before Wollman Rink opens its 2026-27 skating season. We rebuilt the Central Park rink's site on our new Breakdance blueprint, a ready-made WordPress starting point. The site changes its look each month on a schedule, turns into a pickleball site for summer and carries its design onto the ticket-buying pages run by Tessitura, the rink's ticketing system.

The brief

We took our direction from the new marketing plan, which called for seasonal content changes. The rink's site sets out two seasons: ice skating daily from October 28, 2026 through March 16, 2027, and in summer, pickleball courts run by CityPickle. One site has to serve both and look current every month.

We removed the old site's design template, page-building tool and slideshow add-on, and replaced its SEO add-on.

How the seasonal content works

Season themes live in a custom plugin (a WordPress add-on) we built for the rink. Each theme holds:

• six named colours
• an animated motif for the hero, the big banner at the top of the home page
• the opening words of the home page headline
• hero and feature images
• a matching postcard frame

Every colour on the site comes from those six: buttons, forms, the browser bar on phones, the rink calendar, the maps and the ticket pages.

A theme can cover a date range, a type of day such as Community Day, or a whole season. Dated and Community Day themes take priority over a season-wide one. Just after midnight, an automatic check looks for a new theme for the day and clears the site's stored copies of its pages, so visitors don't see yesterday's colours. Saving a theme clears them at once.

Six monthly themes, already scheduled

For the 2026-27 season:

• October: Meet Me at Wollman, with glints on navy and ice
• November: Autumn Magic, falling leaves in rust and amber over a fall mural
• December: Wollman Wonderland, lights on deep green and gold
• January: NYC Skates Here, flurries in blue over a winter mural
• February: Love on Ice, hearts in rose
• March: Skate into Spring, petals in green

A Community Day theme, confetti in purple and gold, takes over on each Community Day on the rink calendar. The first switch comes on October 31, and Autumn Magic follows on November 2. Each monthly theme also sets the frame on the postcard page, where guests fit a photo into it and save or share it from their own device.

Summer pickleball

Summer has its own mode, set by one start date. On that date the summer copy and the CityPickle look take over together, and the end date brings skating back. In summer:

• the home headline reads "CityPickle at Wollman", with the CityPickle wordmark and a court photo
• the home cards change to Book a Court and Private Court Events
• skating-only sections hide, and pages such as lessons, hockey and season passes open with "Ice skating returns in the fall." and a newsletter link
• key pages get summer search titles and descriptions

Pages carry both seasons, but browsers don't download the images or embedded content for the season that's hidden.

Planning a visit: the maps

The old plan page showed two static map images with no text description for screen reader users. We traced the rink's printed park and rink maps and redrew them as interactive maps that stay sharp at any size.

The park map filters by how you're arriving: subway, bus, on foot, bike share or car, with notes on stations, buses and Citi Bike. It can also walk you in step by step from 6th Avenue through Artists' Gate, the closest entrance, or from 5th Avenue through Scholars' Gate.

The rink map labels 14 places, with filters for getting in, skates and lockers and restrooms, food and drink, and private event spaces. First-time skaters can follow a walk-through from the Box Office through the lines, the waiver and skates. Both maps take the current theme's colours and show CityPickle badges in summer. Each has a text title and description and lists every point as text after the graphic, for screen reader users. The PDF downloads and Google Maps directions stay.

Tickets on Tessitura

The rink sells tickets through TNEW, Tessitura's online ticket site, which wraps each ticket page in a header and footer it copies from the WordPress site. We adapted that header and footer for TNEW: full web addresses on every link, none of the main site's add-on code, the brand font served from somewhere TNEW can load it, and the season settings TNEW strips out put back, so ticket pages follow the monthly theme and the summer or skating mode.

We researched how Tessitura builds its ticket pages and its design requirements before styling them, down to its login and cart-timeout pop-ups. Calendar/List and Day/Week/Month became rounded switch buttons. The date bar sits on one row with round previous and next buttons, the month grid labels Today, and event links became navy pills that run full width on phones. A box-office status TNEW showed in pure red now sits in a badge that meets the accessibility standard for readable contrast.

The rink calendar links each upcoming day to that day's sessions in the ticket calendar, using the link format in Tessitura's TNEW manual. We also fixed the visitor statistics so each ticket page is counted under its own address.

Built on our Breakdance blueprint

Our blueprint is a WordPress starting point: Breakdance, a visual site builder, with no WordPress design template underneath and a standard set of add-ons for SEO, forwarding old addresses and vector graphics. The rink's seasons, postcard and ticket template sit on top as their own plugins. Staff edit season themes, the summer dates and the rink calendar as records in WordPress.

The design pairs a licensed display font, Sequel Neue, with Lora, both served from the rink's own site. Images ship as compressed modern-format copies, the top banner gets smaller crops for phones, and tracking code waits until the page has nothing else to do. Entrance animations never leave content hidden or links out of reach for keyboard users.

Want a site like this?

If your venue sells through Tessitura or runs on a seasonal calendar, call us at 780-540-7606, or read about our web development work.