Shelter

Shelter Youth & Family Services provides emergency housing and support services for youth and families in crisis or experiencing trauma.

They reached out to Mightybytes to assist with website maintenance and a redesign after experiencing downtime and losing site backups. Here’s how we stabilized and supported Shelter’s existing website while simultaneously guiding them through a redesign.

Because youth and families in crisis use Shelter’s website to find assistance 24/7, stability is incredibly important. When the site went down and they struggled to correspond with their website host, among other issues, the team realized they were overwhelmed with technical debt. 

With no in-house tech support, Shelter needed a partner to fix urgent issues and conduct website maintenance. Understanding this, we prioritized the following goals during our engagement with Shelter:

1. Stabilize the existing website as soon as possible
2. Update WordPress, plugins, and software as needed to improve stability and provide regular backups
3. Provide ongoing website support as needed to keep the site stable ahead of a redesign while also focusing on marketing goals

After auditing their digital infrastructure, we took steps to mitigate downtime risks and establish ongoing scheduled maintenance. This significantly reduced unexpected technical issues requiring immediate attention. 

Meanwhile, we began a website redesign process.

Shelter was aware from the beginning that there was uncertainty around how their primary audiences use the website. With a very limited budget and a small team, they have little capacity for SEO and user research. Over the years, this led to many assumptions about user needs and content strategy. 

Despite these challenges, Shelter was ready to create a new WordPress website to match recently updated brand guidelines and make the site more efficient and easier to manage. 

Here’s how we kept the project on budget while meeting Shelter’s goals and priorities.

1. Product Roadmapping

A critical and collaborative strategic planning process, Product Roadmapping investigates important questions to illuminate the most viable path to long-term shared success.

Our process begins with roadmapping workshops. We conducted a series of collaborative exercises that helped the Shelter team come to consensus on business goals, user needs, and feature requests for the redesign.

2. UX Design

The roadmapping workshops also provided a flexible guide for Shelter’s new design. Post-workshop, Mightybytes provided the following UX design deliverables:

• Wireframes and design comps for key pages, reflecting updated brand guidelines 
• Sitemap and new navigation structure
• Component designs for custom blocks and Programs

3. Feature Development

During the roadmapping process, we uncovered the fact that many of Shelter’s desired features could be solved with content changes. Until Shelter has the capacity to do so, we worked with them to create tools to serve their primary users: donors and youth and families in crisis.

It’s important that Shelter demonstrate the impact of donations to the organization. While their team worked to compile content for an Impact Overview webpage, we developed a custom block that shows how donations make a difference.

Shelter also wanted a way for clients to find specific programs that serve their needs. Our team designed and built a filter block that allows users to select their situation and explore programs they qualify for. 

To help website editors manage their new tools, we created a detailed instruction manual and led a training session.

The Shelter team conducted a mini-audit of their blog posts. Many old posts were removed and redirected. Without capacity to make significant updates, we migrated remaining content from the old site.

Once Shelter reviewed and approved, we worked directly with their third-party IT team to launch the new site. 

Since site launch, we have provided ongoing scheduled maintenance and website support. From tending to post-launch items like additional page layouts and custom block updates to troubleshooting issues, we appreciate Shelter’s collaborative partnership to achieve their goals. 

As the organization’s needs evolve, we look forward to offering continued support.