Website Design & Development for Major Toll Roadway

Pocahontas Parkway 895 serves thousands of Richmond-area drivers who arrive on the website each with one thing in mind: pay a toll, dispute a charge, figure out E-ZPass, and they need to do it fast. Any and all friction translates directly into confused drivers clogging toll booth lines and flooding the on-site support team with calls about things the website should have already answered.

The old site had three core problems:

The goal: Transform the website from a digital brochure into a functional self-service platform that reduces inbound support volume and improves toll payment efficiency.

Accessibility constraints: As a public-facing utility serving a broad regional population, the redesign required ADA compliance (WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 Level AA standards), readability for low-digital-confidence users, and a mobile-first approach, since the majority of drivers searching for toll information do so on their phones, often while still in their cars.

Working with the Pocahontas Parkway operations team, I identified the three highest-priority driver tasks through a combination of client feedback from toll booth staff, analytics review, and quality audit of the existing site. Tolling staff reported that the most common inbound calls were about payment confusion, dispute status, and E-ZPass enrollment, all things the old site technically addressed, but buried poorly.

This informed the primary IA decision: the homepage would lead with three explicit, scannable tasks: Pay a Missed Toll, Get an E-ZPass, and Dispute a Charge with clear CTAs above the fold.

The old navigation grouped content into broad categories (“Traveling Pocahontas 895,” “Payment Center”) that required users to know the site's internal logic to find what they needed. I restructured the nav around driver intent:

The dispute page became one of the most carefully considered UX decisions in the project. Rather than a simple form or a contact prompt, I structured it as a guided Q&A flow:

The old FAQ was a documentation dump. I restructured it with clear section headings, reduced the number of visible accordion items per section, and ensured the most commonly searched questions appeared first. The restructured page showed an average engagement time of 1:59, indicating that users are finding answers.

For maps, convoluted, detailed graphics overwhelmed and confused toll drivers more than they assisted with the flow of daily traffic. As Pocahontas Parkway wanted to define itself with its slogan: “Your Shortcut Around Richmond”, we aimed to recreate simple, informative maps with quick overviews and links to unique routes via Google Maps.

Keyword research informed both content structure and page naming, while maintaining the structural integrity of the previous sitemap. Pages were optimized for high-intent transactional queries, and the real terms drivers actually search for when they owe a toll. Structured data, sitemap coverage, and crawlability were addressed from the build stage and tested post-launch.

An ongoing Website Quality Audit (WQA) system continuously monitors indexation, schema implementation, keyword rankings, and technical action items. Every 3-6 months, the audit is rerun to identify areas for improvement and gaps in visibility.