Pinnacle Community Services
Pinnacle Community Services is a private, non-profit, trauma informed family service agency that has been at work in the Niagara County community since 1895. Pinnacle’s strength is a network of interrelated and complementary services that enables them to serve people at every age and every stage of life.
One of my favorite things about being a small business owner is that I get to know each client and remember every person I’ve worked with. When Pinnacle’s former marketing manager, Sydney Dippold, reached out to me I recognized her name immediately. Sydney also works for Mary Beth Debus, the talent behind Program Savvy Consulting. I built Mary Beth’s new website awhile back, and Sydney reached out to me because she knew Mary Beth loved working with me. That made my day!
Sydney knew Pinnacle’s website needed a total overhaul. She wanted to make it easier for people in need to find services and resources—most crucially the 24/7 crisis support hotlines that Pinnacle offers. Last but not least, Sydney was also hoping for a website that would be simpler for Pinnacle’s team to manage going forward.
Done and done.
What a pleasure it was to give Pinnacle the website they deserve!
The original website
Like many of my nonprofit clients, Pinnacle already had a website. But it had been built on WordPress “back in the day.” Translation: It was six years old. Boxy. Bloated. Outdated. And really hard to maintain.
The original site was hard for people to navigate, too, and the 24/7 crisis support hotline numbers weren’t as prominent as they should be. There was a lot of text, long drop-down menus, and lots of hard-to-see text links.
To give you an idea of where we started, here’s a look at the original home page:
The web design process
Sydney knew the original website needed a total overhaul, and not only because it wasn’t as brand-aligned as it could be.
Pinnacle’s core services—domestic violence support, care coordination, parenting support, and youth services—weren’t well represented on the existing site. Each service pillar has its own branding, which wasn’t included on the original site. We also needed to consolidate information, more clearly describe available services, and make it easier for people in need to reach out.
The new website also needed to connect donors to opportunities to support Pinnacle’s work and offer a translation option for Spanish speakers.
Sydney got to work gathering brand assets, updated wording, and photos. While she was working on that, I sketched out visitor pathways through the site so that people in need, donors, and community members could find the information in two clicks or less.
The design came together quickly!
I kept the design ultra-simple. Crisis hotlines are prominent on the home page, on the contact page, and on the page for each of Pinnacle’s four service pillars. Speaking of those service pillar pages, I used the same design for each so it’d be easy for people to skim and find information quickly in a crisis situation.
The website includes a few bells-and-whistles, like a Quick Escape button on the domestic violence support page and one-click site translation into Spanish using Google Translate’s free service.
To add a bit of personality, I used sticky blocks and added some custom code to bring in service-specific branding accents, drop shadows, button hover effects, and more.
Check out their new home page design below!
