Visit Mercer County: how we built the Capital County’s tourism website
Mercer County, New Jersey packs a remarkable amount into one region: the state capital, a world famous university town, Revolutionary War landmarks, farms, trails and a restaurant scene people drive in for. Visitors kept asking the same question, where do I start? The answer we built is Visit Mercer County, the county’s official tourism website, and this post is a full walkthrough of how it works.
We designed it, built it and now host and manage it. Below we cover search, events, the town pages, the hosting and multisite setup behind it, and why a site like this is ready for a mobile app whenever the county wants one.
Take the tour first
Before the details, here is the live site in motion. The desktop cut is the default; switch to mobile to watch the exact same route on a phone sized screen. Both versions slow down on the parts that matter most: the search filters, the event views and the town pages.
Tap Desktop or Mobile to see the same tour on a laptop screen or a phone.
Project overview
Visit Mercer County is owned by the County of Mercer and supported by a New Jersey Division of Travel and Tourism grant. Its job is to gather every attraction, restaurant, hotel, park and community event in the county into one place that a traveler can actually use, and that county staff can keep up to date on their own.
From day one we planned around a few principles:
- Every one of the 12 municipalities deserves its own page, not a single sentence on a long list.
- Content gets entered once as structured data, then shows up automatically everywhere it belongs.
- Visitors on phones come first, because most of them are already out exploring.
- Editors stay inside the WordPress block editor they already know.
The homepage welcomes visitors to the Capital County
Themed panels route people to history, culture, outdoors, lodging and food
Upcoming events flow onto the homepage straight from the calendar
Search that answers real questions
Travelers rarely search for “places.” They search for a museum near the hotel, a trail for Saturday morning, or somewhere to eat in a particular town. So we made search work three ways, and every one of them is a click away.
Search by place
Type a word like “museum” or “trail” and the results fill in as a grid of photo cards. Each card opens a landing page with a photo gallery, the key details and a map, so a visitor can go from a hunch to directions in a couple of taps.
Search by town
Tick a town such as Ewing and the list narrows to the places inside its borders. Because each listing is tagged with its municipality, the town filter stays accurate as new places are added.
Search by category
Prefer to browse by interest? Choose a category like History, Trails, Agritourism or Arts. The directory covers dining, lodging, shopping, music, golf, family fun, sports and breweries and wineries too, and dining alone holds 193 listings.
Combined filters
The real power shows up when filters stack. Pick History, then add Trenton, and the results shrink to the historic sites in the capital city. Every option beside the checkboxes shows a live count, so people can see how many results a choice will give them before they commit to it. A choice that leads nowhere shows zero ahead of time, which means no dead ends.
Under the hood, each click makes one request to a custom REST endpoint, and the results and counts refresh together without a page reload. The filtered view also lives in the address bar, so a visitor can bookmark it or text it to a friend. When we tested on the live site, Dining plus Robbinsville took the list from 193 restaurants down to 19, in about a second.
Events: a full calendar, three ways to see it
Something is happening in Mercer County nearly every day. Our October 2026 calendar view on the live site was packed, with about 20 linked events across the month. To keep that volume friendly, the Community Events section offers keyword search plus filters for date, category and town.
Visitors pick how they want to look at the results:
- List view: an illustrated grid of event cards with dates, categories and venues.
- Map view: pins across the county with a matching list alongside.
- Calendar view: a classic month grid for planning a weekend or a whole trip.
Try “This Month” with Family Fun and you get a full grid of kid friendly outings. Open an event, such as the Corn Harvest at Howell Living History Farm, and the date, time and location sit right at the top. Events entered once also feed the homepage, so the front page never goes stale.
Calendar view: a busy October at a glance
List view with filters for date, category and town
Map view plots events around the county
Event pages lead with when and where
Our Towns
Mercer County spans more than 226 square miles and is made up of three boroughs, seven townships, the city of Trenton and Princeton. Our Towns lays all 12 out as photo cards: East Windsor, Ewing, Hamilton, Hightstown, Hopewell Borough, Hopewell Township, Lawrence, Pennington, Princeton, Robbinsville, Trenton and West Windsor. Each card opens a dedicated town guide.
Trenton
The capital city page opens with a hero image and a map, then a set of quick facts, then Places to Visit. That last section is automatic. Since every listing carries its town, the Trenton page pulls in matching places by itself, and a new addition appears on the town page and in the Trenton search filter at the same moment.
Hopewell Borough
Smaller towns get exactly the same treatment. Hopewell Borough has its own introduction, map and Places to Visit grid, so a visitor planning a quiet afternoon there gets the same depth as someone heading to the capital. One shared template with custom fields keeps all 12 pages consistent while each town keeps its own photos and story.
Hosting and management
We host and manage the site after launch, so the team that wrote the code is the same team watching over it. That includes managed WordPress hosting, security hardening, scheduled offsite backups with restore tests, uptime monitoring and malware and file change monitoring. Updates go to staging first and only reach the live site after they pass.
For the county, that means one partner to call and no handoffs between a builder and a separate host.
One multisite network
Visit Mercer County runs inside a WordPress multisite network. Every site shares one codebase, one set of vetted plugins and one theme foundation, while each keeps its own content, editors and settings. A security fix or update ships once and covers the whole network, and a new site can launch quickly from blocks that are already proven.
Built to become an app
This is where the AppPresser side of our work comes in. Everything on Visit Mercer County is structured data served through WordPress: places with categories and towns, events with dates and locations, and town guides built from custom fields. That is exactly the kind of content we turn into native iOS and Android apps.
Faceted search, a map of nearby events and town guides all translate naturally to a phone app, and push notifications could highlight a weekend festival to people who opted in. Because the data already lives in one place, an app would stay in sync with the website without double entry. We did the same kind of local discovery work for the Palmer Square app in Princeton, right here in Mercer County.
More screens from the live site
The takeaway
Visit Mercer County gives the county one official tourism home that covers all 12 towns, a deep directory of places and a busy events calendar, and it works just as well on a phone as on a desktop. Staff update it in the block editor, and we keep it fast and secure behind the scenes.
Want a destination site, a directory or a companion mobile app for your community? Tell us about your project.
