> cat fairview_children's_center.md

Fairview Children's Center

[DATE] 2025-02-04

The Project

Melissa reached out because she needed help making a few updates to her website. I teamed up with my sister Jennifer, a UX researcher whose child attends the center, to put together a proposal after showing Melissa some of the missed opportunities her site had in reaching prospective parents.

The Challenge

The existing site had the basics: information about programs, contact details, hours. But it wasn’t working hard enough. The design was dated, navigation was confusing on mobile, and the content was structured as walls of text rather than clear calls to action. For a children’s center competing for enrollment, the website is often a parent’s first impression. It needed to feel as welcoming and organized as the center itself.

I’ve always been interested in working on a WordPress theme but hadn’t spent much time in that ecosystem before. Given my history with front-end development, I embraced the challenge. I love learning new tech.

Timeline

January 2025 - February 2025

What I Built

The overhaul went beyond the updates Melissa originally asked for. Once we identified the opportunities, the scope expanded to a full rebuild with the goal of making the site something she could manage confidently on her own.

Technical Specs

Platform: WordPress
Theme: Brand new custom theme, page hierarchy, and menus (including mobile)
Design: Strategic UI overhaul focusing on clear Call to Actions rather than “walls of text”
Responsive: Fully responsive across all device sizes with a mobile-first approach
Dark Mode: Complete light and dark mode support with user preference persistence
Tooling: Leveraged Gemini 3 for the redesign process

New Functionality

FAQ & News: Added a dedicated FAQ page and a News section where Melissa can create and categorize posts herself.
Meet Our Team: A new page featuring staff pictures to help parents get to know the center.
Custom Navigation: A complete restructure of the menus to make the site easier to navigate on any device.

Under the Hood

I also handled a lot of the technical debt that had piled up over the years:

Infrastructure: Upgraded the site to the latest PHP version.
Security: Cleaned up security gaps by removing many old, unused user accounts.
Optimization: Sunsetted problematic plugins to reduce the overhead for future upgrades.
Staging Workflow: I enabled a staging site (which she was already paying for but not using). This allowed us to showcase the work in progress and, more importantly, gave Melissa a safe place to try out updates without being scared of breaking the live production environment.

Knowledge Handoff

I didn’t want to just finish the site and leave Melissa hanging. I took the time to record knowledge handoffs so she knows exactly how to maintain the site. By showing her a workflow that allows her to sync from staging to production, she can now manage her site with confidence.

Why This Matters

Not every project needs to be enterprise-scale to be meaningful. Fairview serves families in a local community, and a good website can be the difference between a parent enrolling their child or moving on to the next search result. This project reminded me why I got into building things in the first place.

Visual Archive