Nanaimo Homeless Coalition Website
Timeline
May 2021 - July 2021Role
Type
Nanaimo Homeless Coalition Website
What if a non-profit's website could reliably serve its community without technical barriers?
The website had multiple bugs and technical issues left by a previous agency, poor SEO configuration, and limited content visibility on the homepage, impacting the coalition's ability to serve their community effectively.
Expanded hero section containers with vertically centered text to eliminate orphaned words
News page redesign with category filters and improved content display
Fixed styling issues causing blue partner organization text to protrude out of alignment
Project Overview
The website had multiple bugs and technical issues left by a previous agency, poor SEO configuration, and limited content visibility on the homepage, impacting the coalition's ability to serve their community effectively.
Our Goals
Fix Critical Bugs
Resolve technical issues and improve site reliability
Improve Discoverability
Enhance SEO and social media integration
Accessibility Improvements
Improve user experience and accessibility standards
The Problem
Technical Website Issues
The website had multiple bugs and technical issues left by a previous agency, poor SEO configuration, and limited content visibility on the homepage, impacting the coalition's ability to serve their community effectively.
Development Approach
Provided 37+ hours of WordPress development across 25+ tasks to systematically address bugs, improve technical infrastructure, optimize SEO, and enhance user experience.
Child Theme Setup & Development Infrastructure
Backed up existing theme as precaution and set up proper WordPress child theme infrastructure to enable safe customizations without affecting core theme updates. This foundation allowed for extensive development work including navigation menu interaction changes (click to hover), global styles improvements (left-aligned bullet points instead of center), image optimization solutions, and systematic bug resolution across 8+ critical issues left by the previous agency.
UX & Interaction Improvements
Enhanced user experience through multiple refinements: Changed global navigation menu from click to hover interactions for faster navigation. Adjusted global styles to left-align bullet points for better readability. Optimized image sizing site-wide to improve page load performance. In the About Homelessness page, increased accordion tab text length, added 2 additional challenge sections, and fixed image sizing for half photo/half content sections.
Mailchimp Integration
Installed and configured Mailchimp plugin to enable email marketing capabilities and newsletter subscriptions. Integrated sign-up forms throughout the site to grow the coalition's mailing list and improve community communication.
Password-Protected Members Area
Created password-protected pages for internal meetings and member-only content, similar to United Way's system. Implemented secure access controls to protect sensitive coalition information while maintaining easy access for authorized members.
Social Media Plugin Integration
Added social media plugins to the homepage and news section to increase engagement and content sharing. Enabled visitors to easily follow coalition updates and share important community resources across social platforms.
Yoast SEO Configuration
Configured Yoast SEO plugin with proper settings for titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, and schema markup. Optimized on-page SEO to improve search engine visibility and help community members find coalition resources.
Open Graph Social Integration
Implemented Open Graph meta tags to improve social media sharing across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. When coalition content is shared, proper titles, descriptions, and images now display, increasing engagement and reach.
Navigation Structure Enhancement
Improved site navigation structure and internal linking to help search engines better understand content hierarchy and relationships. Enhanced user experience while improving SEO through better site architecture.
News Page Comprehensive Redesign
Completely redesigned the news blog list page: increased article display from 4 to 8 posts, removed alternating sections and centered the list for cleaner visual hierarchy, fixed back button navigation to arrive at top of page from news articles. Changed page heading to 'What's happening in Nanaimo' while reducing white space and removing redundant text. Implemented category dropdown filters (supporting multiple category assignments per post) and date-based search dropdowns to help visitors quickly find relevant coalition news.
News Article Template Improvements
Refined the news article template page by removing category from title and repositioning it above title in small text for better visual hierarchy. This change improved readability and helped visitors quickly identify article topics without cluttering the main heading.
Video Page & YouTube Embedder Fix
Created custom page template to display coalition videos in an organized, accessible format. Fixed broken YouTube embedder functionality in blog posts to enable proper video content sharing and improve multimedia storytelling capabilities.
Blog Post Image Optimization
Optimized blog post featured images to 1080x400 dimensions in a compact box format at the top of posts. This improvement minimized excessive scrolling and helped visitors reach article content faster while maintaining visual appeal.
Category System Enhancement
Redesigned category display system from an unwieldy ongoing list to clean dropdown menus for better user experience. Enabled multiple category assignments per blog post to improve content organization and discoverability, allowing coalition updates to be tagged across multiple relevant topics.
Recommended Posts Feature
Implemented related content recommendations at the bottom of blog posts to increase engagement and help visitors discover more relevant coalition resources. Used WordPress relationship logic to surface contextually relevant articles based on categories and tags.
Web Style Guide Documentation
Created comprehensive web style guide on 8.5" x 11" format documenting color palette with hex codes, font styles, font sizes, and usage examples. This deliverable enabled consistent brand application across all coalition materials and empowered the marketing team to maintain design consistency independently.
Accessibility & Mobile Responsiveness
Implemented accessibility enhancements including proper heading hierarchy, alt text for images, keyboard navigation improvements, and color contrast adjustments. Fixed responsive design issues to ensure proper display across all devices, critical for serving community members accessing services via mobile.
Project Impact
Delivered 37+ hours of WordPress development across 25+ tasks, resolving 8+ critical bugs, optimizing SEO and social media integration, and doubling homepage content visibility to better serve Nanaimo's homeless community.
Hours Delivered
WordPress development hours across technical improvements
Tasks Completed
Individual development tasks and enhancements
Bugs Resolved
Critical bugs fixed improving site reliability
"Thank you for all the work you've done on our site."
Nicole Benson
Marketing & Communications Manager
KEY LEARNINGS
Key Learnings
Design Insights
Visual and interaction design learnings
•Proper child theme infrastructure is essential for long-term WordPress maintainability
•Small improvements like doubling homepage article display can significantly increase content engagement
•Accessibility improvements benefit all users, not just those with disabilities
Product Insights
Why this approach is valuable
•Non-profit organizations often inherit technical debt from previous agencies
•SEO and social media integration are critical for community-focused organizations to reach those who need help
•Systematic bug resolution builds trust and improves organizational credibility
Specific details may be limited due to NDAs. Projects may be updated due to growth.
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