A crisis center's website, rebuilt for the phone in someone's hand
A 24-hour crisis organization was serving people through a static HTML site that did not work on a phone. I designed and built a modern, mobile-first replacement for free, then trained their director to run it herself.
Why it mattered
A small non-profit in Lompoc and the Santa Maria Valley provides life-saving services to people experiencing domestic and sexual violence, around the clock. Their website was old-school static HTML — as so many non-profit sites are, because of budget, time, and volunteer constraints. Who has time to worry about a website when you are providing critical services on a 24-hour basis?
But the people who need a crisis center most often reach for it on a phone, in a hurry, sometimes in an unsafe situation. A site that does not work on mobile is not an aesthetic problem in that context.
What I did
A friend had started volunteering there in spring 2019. I looked up the Center, saw the site, and asked if they would let me help. I spoke with the director about her goals and the organization's, then proposed building a full working draft they could demo live — at no charge — and training them to maintain it themselves so the ongoing budget stayed near zero.
I designed and built the site in two weeks: a modern aesthetic, real mobile usability, and messaging rewritten from their existing materials to be much more succinct. I built a filterable video resource library pulling together content that had been scattered on their YouTube channel. I created volunteer, donor, and contact forms and integrated them with a new Mailchimp account, set up so that whichever form someone submitted tagged them accordingly — letting the organization send relevant information to each group rather than the same email to everyone.
Most importantly, I built it on WordPress with Divi, the most approachable page builder for beginners, so volunteers could maintain it. After three training sessions the director was updating complex content across the site on her own.
Results
The site serves critical messaging with a powerful aesthetic, includes specific usability features, and is fully mobile friendly. Its forms, email marketing, and CMS integrations run themselves as a continuous donor and contact collection system.
To this day the director needs only the occasional one-off question answered, a plugin update, or a social feed reconnected after a password change. Everything else is run by a go-getting, non-technical non-profit leader — which was the entire point.