A nonprofit consultancy's full rebuild, start to launch

The situation

Guiding Good is a consultancy in Claremont, New Hampshire, founded by two partners with sixty years of combined nonprofit experience between them. They advise nonprofits on marketing, grants, events, leadership training and fundraising.

Their existing site was a WordPress build that had drifted. The writing that mattered — partner biographies, a detailed services document, a decade of published articles — was scattered across Word files, an ageing blog, and a previous site that was partly offline. Prospective clients are nonprofit executive directors and board chairs deciding whether to trust an outside advisor. The site had to carry that weight, and it was not.

What was needed

• A single, credible home for the practice, built around what they actually sell
• Their published writing recovered, edited and republished as a working article library
• An enquiry route that reaches them reliably and is traceable when it fails
• Something the partners can add to themselves, without a developer and without a CMS to maintain

Approach

Brand first, then everything from it. The palette was sampled directly from the compass mark in their logo — deep navy, teal, aqua and a signal red — then expressed as design tokens so the whole site stays consistent. The red was deepened for body and button use so text meets contrast requirements against white.

Content before layout. The services document, both partner biographies and the advisor profile were read end to end and rewritten for the web. Eleven published articles were recovered from Word files and an archived copy of the old site, re-edited, and given proper publication dates, authorship and topics.

A stack chosen for who maintains it. Astro renders every page to static HTML at build time. htmx handles the article topic filtering, and Alpine handles small interface state — the mobile menu, a reading-progress bar, form status. There is no CMS to patch, no plugin surface, and no database. Adding an article means adding a Markdown file.

Progressive enhancement throughout. Every article filter is a real link to a real page, so the site works with JavaScript disabled and every filtered view has a shareable URL. htmx intercepts the click and swaps only the results. The contact form posts normally without JavaScript and follows a redirect; with JavaScript it swaps the response in place.

What was delivered

A thirty-page site: home, about, team biographies, a services index with a page for each of the five practice areas, an article library with per-topic filtering and pages, contact, and a thank-you page.

Alongside it: logo application and brand tokens, photography of the partners, structured data for search engines, per-page social metadata, a generated sitemap, and written handover documentation covering how to add an article and how the email pipeline is configured.

The enquiry form posts to a serverless function that validates the submission and sends it on through a verified sending domain. If delivery ever fails, the sender is told plainly and the full submission is written to the server log — nothing is silently lost.

Results

Measured on the live site:

The practical consequences matter more than the numbers. There is no hosting bill of consequence, because static files cost almost nothing to serve. There is no plugin maintenance, no security patching cycle, and no version upgrade that breaks a page builder. The partners can publish an article without calling anyone.

Accessibility and standards

Built with semantic landmarks and heading order, a skip link, visible keyboard focus states throughout, prefers-reduced-motion support, live-region announcements on the contact form, and a colour palette checked for contrast. Every interactive control is reachable and operable by keyboard.

Technical notes

Astro 7, htmx 2, Alpine.js 3, a hand-written CSS design system with no framework dependency, deployed on Vercel. Articles are a Markdown content collection with a typed schema. The one server-rendered route is the contact endpoint; everything else is prerendered.