Case studies: what we built and what changed

A national non-profit with a network of local chapters

Platform: WordPress, hosted on Pantheon.

The challenge

The organization's web presence was scattered across its local chapters. Branding didn't match from site to site, the national site was outdated, and the experience didn't work well on phones. Leadership wanted to refresh the brand and bring every chapter along with it.

What the project included

The project included interviews with the organization's key audiences and local staff, card sorting and tree testing to shape a site structure that serves several distinct audiences, a brand refresh, mission-driven storytelling, and virtual training and written documentation so local teams could run their own sites.

What we did

• Developed the new national WordPress site and a shared starting template that each chapter can tailor, so the network stays consistent while each site stays local.
• Put the national site and more than 70 chapter sites on Pantheon, so the whole network runs on one platform. That makes maintenance, security, and performance easier to manage.
• Rolled the chapter sites out in phases.
• Handled SEO and accessibility work across the network.
• Have kept up ongoing maintenance since the relaunch.

Results

(year over year after relaunch, from site analytics) The relaunch saw:

• About 20% more site visitors
• A significant rise in donation clicks
• Better accessibility scores across the network's sites
• More time on site and a lower bounce rate

Tech and approach

WordPress, a shared multi-site template, Pantheon hosting for the national site and more than 70 chapter sites, phased rollout, SEO, accessibility.

A national franchise brand's franchise-development site (rescue, upgrade, and ongoing care)

Platform: Drupal (9 to 10).

The challenge

This Drupal 9 site helps recruit new franchise owners. When support from the previous vendor fell off, the site came to us in rough shape:

• The one staging site didn't work, so there was no safe place to test changes.
• Nothing was documented: not the server setup, the base install, the CMS configuration, or the integrations.
• Local development only half worked, which slowed down every fix.
• There was no way to copy live data and files down to staging or local, so every test was a guess.

What we did

• Spent two months taking over, documenting, and stabilizing the site.
• Rebuilt local development and staging from scratch: four environments (local, two staging, live), plus custom scripts to sync the database and files from live down to the others.
• Hardened and stabilized the AWS hosting (EC2, RDS, CloudFront, and a load balancer) for steady production traffic.
• Upgraded Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 in stages, covering core, contributed, and custom modules, with testing locally and on both staging sites before going live. No data was lost.
• Set up Bitbucket Pipelines CI/CD with branch-based deployments: merging to a branch builds the matching environment automatically.
• Mapped the user flows for the prospective-owner journey and built it in Salesforce, from first interest through becoming a new franchisee.
• Built a two-way Salesforce integration. Leads come in through Salesforce forms and FormAssembly, Salesforce data flows back to the site, and marketing automation triggers fire along the way.
• Wrote custom Drupal modules: a calendar (ICS) generator that pulls events from Salesforce, and a cache-busting module that keeps embedded Salesforce forms fresh.
• Designed and built email marketing templates and set up Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Handled SEO: structured data (JSON-LD schema), canonical URLs, on-page cleanup site-wide, keyword mapping, and blog drafting.
• Added security headers across the stack.

The project also includes analytics work: performance analysis, dashboards, and tracking.

When it mattered

• Silent deploy failures. The inherited pipelines stopped working without showing any errors, so deployments were quietly failing. We rebuilt every pipeline and had deployments working again in under 24 hours.
• A site-down loop. A misconfiguration between the database and the load balancer created a feedback loop that took the site down. We worked through the weekend to diagnose it, reconfigure, and stabilize the stack.

Results

• Two years of continuous partnership, with the site running cleanly since the rescue
• Drupal 9 to 10 upgrade with zero data loss
• Deployments restored in under 24 hours after the pipeline failure
• Database and load-balancer outage stabilized over one weekend
• Continuous uptime monitoring, with outages detected and answered in minutes on average
• A two-way Salesforce sync feeding leads and content
• A steady cadence of legal-reviewed blog posts (we drafted; the client's legal team reviews).

Tech used

Drupal 9 to 10, AWS (EC2, RDS, CloudFront, load balancer), Bitbucket Pipelines CI/CD, Salesforce (two-way sync, Marketing Cloud), FormAssembly, custom Drupal modules, JSON-LD schema, security headers.

A regional healthcare provider's Drupal migration, redesign, and rebuild

Platform: Drupal (a legacy Drupal site moved up two major versions, in sequence).

The challenge

A growing healthcare organization had a fragmented web presence and needed to modernize it without disrupting the people who rely on it for care. Bringing the site up to date meant migrating through two major Drupal versions in the right order, so the site stayed available the whole time. Patients, families, community members, partners, and donors all needed one simple path to the care and information they were looking for. And the new site had to feel warm and welcoming while fitting in with its parent health system's brand.

What the project included

The project team handled brand alignment, so the site feels like part of the larger health system while keeping its own warm, distinct presence, along with SEO and analytics work.

What we did

We handled all of the development and all of the accessibility work, and we directed the design.

• Mapped the journeys patients, families, and partners take, so the new structure cuts down friction at every step.
• Directed the user-centered design, so the new experience follows those journeys.
• Sequenced and ran the multi-version Drupal migration with zero downtime.
• Rebuilt the site in Drupal so it works smoothly on phones, tablets, and desktops, and people can find care, providers, and information wherever they are.
• Led the accessibility work and built the new site to accessibility standards from the start.

Results

After launch, the site saw:

• About 20% more traffic
• About 40% more time on site
• Zero downtime during the full migration
• A new site built to accessibility standards from the start

Tech and approach

Drupal, a sequenced multi-version migration, user journey mapping, design direction, responsive build optimized for mobile, accessibility built in from the start.

Got a project like one of these?

Whether you need a new WordPress or Drupal build, a rescue and upgrade, a Salesforce integration, or someone to keep things running, we'd like to hear about it. Tell us what you're working on, or start with a free WCAG audit.