For St. Elizabeth Shelter and Supportive Housing, a Santa Fe nonprofit dedicated to assisting homeless individuals and families through emergency shelter, food, case management, counseling, supportive housing, and referrals to partnering human service agencies, I designed and developed a custom WordPress website built around the realities of how the people the organization serves actually find help. The site needed to communicate mission, prove credibility to donors, and at the same time function as a working access point for clients in crisis — three jobs that pull a website in three directions at once.
The challenge was making a site that could speak clearly to very different audiences without compromising for any of them. A potential donor evaluating the organization arrives with different expectations than a board member looking up a meeting time, a volunteer signing up for a Saturday shift, a partner agency confirming a referral, or someone seeking shelter for the first time who needs to know where to go before sundown. The site had to handle all of those visits without burying the most urgent paths.
I designed the site around a custom WordPress build with a deliberately simple front-end navigation backed by a richer underlying structure. The design system was rebuilt mobile-first, on the assumption that many of the people most affected by the organization’s work would arrive on a phone, often on limited data, sometimes in stressful circumstances. Every page was rebuilt to load quickly, scale predictably, and avoid the small frictions that compound into tab-closes.
Four custom features carried most of the weight. An interactive map shows the organization’s facilities and partner locations across Santa Fe so a visitor can find the right door without reading a directory. An organization timeline tells St. Elizabeth’s history in a single scrollable view, giving donors and journalists a fast credibility read. A full Spanish translation makes the entire site accessible to a significant share of the local audience. And a custom routed contact-form system sends each inquiry — donor, volunteer, client, or partner — to the right staff member automatically, replacing a single overloaded inbox with the right hand-off the first time.
The result is a website that works as much for the people the organization serves as it does for the people who fund the organization, and that the staff can keep current without ceremony. For an organization whose mission is keeping doors open in Santa Fe, the website is now another door — easier to find, easier to walk through, and clearly part of the same organization on either side of it.
