Two products, one build
Visitors need a clear explanation and an obvious next step. Staff need a safe way to keep that explanation true.
InvestED · Live
The homepage was only half the job.
I redesigned how InvestED explains what it does, then built the WordPress system underneath it. The site is the part you can see. The part I care about more is that the staff can change a number, add an event, or swap out a form themselves — next year, without me.
- Focus
- Design, content architecture, WordPress
- Status
- Live at invested.org, still shipping
- Role
- Strategy, design, build, handoff
What I walked into
A wish list, a small budget, and no developer after me.
InvestED came with a list of everything they wanted the site to do — impact figures that stay current everywhere, staff-run events and sponsors, a story library, a dozen hosted forms — and with two hard limits around it. The team had to be able to run it themselves once I was gone, and it had to be cheap to keep online. Most of my job was working out which of those three things actually had to give, and finding out that none of them did.
Content that will not sit still
Impact figures, events, reports, sponsors, people, and hosted form URLs all change on different schedules.
A handoff, not a launch
Routine edits could not depend on anyone remembering how a custom theme was wired together. Me included.
How I worked
I built the site and the editor as one thing.
I mapped the visitor path and the staff jobs at the same time. On the site, the order is the barrier, then help arriving, then what changed. Behind it, anything likely to move became a structured field, a record staff edit once, or a task on their home screen.
The screen every number on the site comes from
One place, everywhere
Change a figure here and it updates on every page that prints it, including the announcement bar.
A named owner
Who verified these numbers is a field, because “where did this come from” is the first question anyone asks.
A review date
A number with no expiry quietly goes stale on the homepage and nobody notices.
Content architecture
Understanding, trust, then action.
Understand
- Why this matters
- How immediate help works
- Current impact
Trust
- Stories and proof
- Team and financials
- Partner schools
Act
- Donate
- Sponsor
- Attend an event
- School login
A new page starts somewhere safe
Staff pick a story, campaign, report, gallery, or plain information starter. Each one already follows the design system, and every section inside it stays editable. Nobody begins at a blank white screen and improvises a layout.
One quote bank, many carousels
Approved quotes live in one list. Staff filter it, place a quote on a page, set the order and how long it holds, and reuse it without making a second copy that can drift.
Shared facts & links
Annual figures have one home, one owner, and a review date. Change 54,960 here and it changes on every page that prints it, plus the bar across the top of the site.
The call that shaped everything
They wanted Wix. What they wanted could not be built on Wix.
The brief arrived as a wish list — impact figures that update themselves everywhere, staff-managed events and sponsors, a library of stories, a dozen hosted forms — with two constraints attached: the team had to run it without a developer, and it had to be cheap to keep. They had already decided on Wix.
Wix would have given them the second constraint and quietly dropped most of the first. My job was to say so, and to bring an option rather than an objection. WordPress meant I could build them a custom admin — their own screens, their own language, a figure changed once and updated across every page — and nonprofit hosting rates made it cheaper to run than the platform they had picked. Same budget, none of the features cut. That one decision is why the rest of this project exists.
The screen the whole project depended on was the one that did not work
Every number and form link on the site lives on one settings screen. That screen was the promise — it is the reason staff would not need me. It was also silently throwing away every edit made on it, and it failed quietly enough that nobody would have reported it as broken — they would have assumed they had done it wrong. I caught it before handover by sitting down and using it the way they would, which is now the last step on anything I hand to someone else.
Freedom and consistency pull against each other
Give staff a blank page and they improvise a layout that drifts from the brand within a month. Lock it down and they cannot do their jobs and stop using it. The answer was starting points rather than restrictions: a story, a campaign, a report, a gallery. Every one already carries the design system, and every section inside stays editable. Nobody begins at a blank screen, and nobody has to ask permission.
Nothing behaves the same way in front of real people
Local previews are forgiving in ways a live site is not, and the problems that mattered only appeared once real content, a real host and a real phone were involved. I now treat launch as the point testing begins, not the point it ends.
invested.org
What exists now
A website, and something the staff actually run.
The live site connects the model, the current proof, and one clear next step. The part I am proudest of is behind the login. Staff open on “What would you like to update?”, click the thing they want to change, and get a field named after what it does — “Timeline entry · description”, not “Short text 3”. Full WordPress is one link away when they actually need it.
54,960 students
What the site reports for the 2025–26 school year. Staff type it in one place and it updates everywhere, down to the announcement bar.
668 partner schools
Help reaches students through the school staff who already know them, so the site frames impact as a statewide system.
Still being worked on
I am converting the last hand-built sections into real WordPress blocks so staff add and reorder things with the controls they already know. Sponsorship tiers went first.
invested.org
What I carry forward
A website is not finished when it looks done.
Name the thing
A bus pass. A lab fee. A pair of glasses. Naming what the money buys explains the model better than any sentence about helping students does.
Whatever is hard to change stops being true
That is what makes the editing screen part of the product rather than the leftovers. A number nobody can update is a number that goes stale on the homepage.
Nothing beats deploying
Every bug that mattered showed up on a real host with real content: pages my local preview had been quietly creating for me, defaults that never reached a saved site, a donation widget that only broke once someone opened it on a phone.