The Parker School is a progressive private school near Albany, New York. They have a beautiful outdoor campus and an active community. The school hired Design TLC to review their website and make some recommendations. They had built the site themselves and added a lot of great content, but it scored low on performance tests, and they wanted some suggestions on how to make it better.

In our review, we pointed out some technical improvements they could make to improve performance, and we discovered during this process that their website also had been hacked and included malware. We were able to remove the malware for them and install some enhanced security with the WordFence plugin.

We cleaned up their sitemap and removed old and unused pages. We created redirects for pages that were changed or removed. We also added custom SEO meta descriptions to all the pages.

The former website had a sliding carousel of images, which made the site slow to load, and had too many buttons.

The new website has a brighter look, a new color palette and more streamlined calls to action.

Read To A Child is a volunteer mentoring nonprofit organization with five locations in the United States. Volunteers meet with students to read aloud with them and serve as a mentor. This is right up our alley at Design TLC – Tara has been a volunteer with a local read aloud program, as well as a mentor for local high school students. Connecting and developing relationships with kids, and serving as a supportive resource for them is one of the best things we can do as adult volunteers.

The old website for Read To A Child was built with WordPress, but it was developed many years ago and needed updating. With 5 locations, we helped to better organize the content and the process for adding new content, such as supporter information, staff and board members.

We created a detailed set of instructions to make it easy for the staff to add and edit content on the website, and developed modules that control the structure to create some automated updates to templates to ensure a consistent layout and look for different types of content.

We loved working with the content for Read To A Child to create a unique, inviting design.

Washington Waldorf School is one of more than 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide. Waldorf schools strive to develop the whole human being in a healthy and nurturing environment. The curriculum is designed to develop students academically, emotionally, and physically. In addition to a strong grounding in core academic skills, WWS students have many opportunities to engage in the arts, music, and drama, as well as textile arts, metalwork, woodwork, and more.

Enter a Waldorf school for a tour and you may be immediately struck by the beauty within the classroom. Waldorf teachers typically do amazing chalkboard drawings, which is something the Washington Waldorf School wanted to visualize on their website. We used an artistic chalk and watercolor design to carry forward the personality of the school. The resulting design is beautiful and user-friendly, creating a welcoming introduction for website visitors.

For 38 years, Britepaths has been providing help and hope to Northern Virginia residents who are working hard, but struggling to thrive in this expensive region. Similar to a business, Britepaths provides social impact services to improve the wellbeing of the community. Their unique programs equip working individuals and families with the tools they need to withstand a crisis situation and begin a journey toward lasting independence.

The former Britepaths website was built with Drupal, and integrated complex and robust CRM/Donor Management software called CiviCRM. Drupal was becoming harder to manage, and required an update which would have necessitated an entire rebuild, so the organization made the decision to move to WordPress, which is easier to use and offers more flexibility in functionality. CiviCRM also works with WordPress, but the process of migrating the forms and database from CiviCRM to WordPress was very labor-intensive and time-consuming.

We created a fresh and bright design that features the main focus of Britepaths: financial empowerment and assistance.