Seneca Street CDC

Seneca Street Community Development Corporation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit located in Buffalo’s Seneca Babcock neighborhood between South Buffalo and the East Side.

They’re a team of wonderful, big-hearted people doing important work in Seneca Babcock—one of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhoods and one that’s classified as having food scarcity, meaning that residents don’t have easy access to fresh fruits, vegetables, and other healthy options. Many children in the neighborhood drop out of school due to lack of transportation and positive role models.

Enter the Seneca Street CDC, which offers free after-school, summer, and teen programs; robust community outreach programs like free legal and health clinics; and help run a free Community Garden so families can grow their own produce and teach their kids about healthy foods.

Tops on Executive Director Cheryl Bird’s wish list for a new website was one that would make it easy for Seneca Babcock parents to find information about available programming and community support efforts. Because Seneca Street CDC relies heavily on volunteers and donors, she also wanted to make it easy for people to learn about and support the organization’s work.

Done and done. What a pleasure to give them the web presence they deserve!

The original website

While Seneca Street CDC already had a web presence, it didn’t have a true website. Instead, it had a blog that was masquerading as a website. A past volunteer had used Wordpress.com, a blogging platform, to create a web presence.

As a result, it was extremely difficult for staff to keep things updated and add photos and downloadable resources like PDFs. The design wasn’t brand-aligned, wasn’t mobile friendly, and sported the dreaded “boxes within boxes” layout typical of Wordpress blogs from “back in the day.” Worst of all, the blog hadn’t been optimized for search engines, so finding them on Google was a hit-and-miss experience at best.

To give you an idea of where we started, here’s a look at part of the old site’s home page:

The web design process

Before we could get started, the team needed help on the technology end of things and I was happy to help. It’s unfortunately all too easy for nonprofits to lose institutional knowledge—especially when that knowledge rests with past volunteers. We started by recovering admin access to their domain names, gathering login credentials for various services they use, and piecing together an understanding of how it was all connected.

Once we had the technical stuff pinned down, it was on to the fun stuff!

Seneca Street CDC already had several of the elements I needed for their website, including a professionally designed logo and color palette. They also had a bajillion pictures of the absurdly photogenic, adorable children who enjoy their programming, and a bajillion more of the big-hearted community members who support the organization.

To help them put together wording for the new site, I created an outline for each page so all they had to do was fill in headings, paragraphs, and button labels. To make it happen, staff teamed up with one of their Board members, who just so happens to be a marketing and communications guru.

Once we had all of the content finalized and ready to go, it was time for design—always my favorite part!

To make it easy for visitors to navigate the depth and breadth of Seneca Street CDCs offerings, I organized the sitemap into a few big buckets: Attend, Receive, and Give. Within each of those buckets, I included programming, community outreach, and support opportunities.

But that’s not all. Each of the organization’s programs are offered for specific groups at specific days and times throughout the year. To make it easy for parents to select programming for their kids, I gathered important information into an “at a glance” section near the top of each page. I did the same on the Give Time page, so volunteers could quickly and easily find a volunteer opportunity that matched their skills and available time.

It was so much fun to bring this design together! I found a few nifty background images that added a bit of personality, then sprinkled in some fun animations, button hover effects, and sticky sections to make it all pop.

Check out their new home page design below: