Strategy you can see, software you can use.

The discovery trail

Research before pixels

Before designing a single screen, I studied how the best therapeutic-riding nonprofits earn trust online. Then I turned the patterns into an information architecture.

See the full discovery trail

Studied four reference nonprofits

The Shea Center, Ride Above Disability, Tara’s Chance, and SD Therapeutic Horsemanship: national names and local peers, to see what families and donors expect.

Extracted the patterns that convert

Emotional hero + one mission line; three CTAs (Donate / Volunteer / Get started); named parent quotes; an accreditation/trust signal; a “what is equine therapy?” explainer for newcomers; meet-the-horses with sponsorship; and impact numbers.

Turned patterns into an information architecture

A first-launch sitemap (Home, Services (PT/OT), Meet the Team, Meet the Horses, Waitlist/Inquiry, Donate/Support, Sponsors, Contact), each section mapped to a user need and a conversion.

Prototyped, reviewed, and refined with the client

A polished homepage and core pages first, reviewed together, then refined. Collaborative all the way through.

Built, QA’d, and shipped

Implemented as fast, accessible pages wired to the services that run the org; checked on a 375 px phone; deployed to a live, HTTPS URL on Cloudflare Pages.

The outcome

A trustworthy front door, live and embeddable

• Live on its own domain at centerxequinetherapy.org with automatic HTTPS, replacing a basic, hard-to-convert previous site.
• Every conversion path working: inquiry/waitlist, volunteer interest, and live Givebutter donations with a donor CRM.
• Mobile-first and accessible, built and checked on a 375 px phone, with trust content (therapist credentials, horses, mission, location and directions) built in.
• One accountable owner for the whole stack (domain, DNS, forms, donations, hosting), so the client never had to wrangle vendors or developers.
• So solid it’s embedded live on the Program Edge home page: the real, deployed site, not a mockup.

How we worked together matters as much as what shipped. I always try to communicate in the way that’s most comfortable for the client. If email is best, we do that. In this case much of our discussion was on Zoom and over text. It’s so important to have that shared context, capture decisions, and make them together.

Shipped & live · Client engagement

Susan Street Fine Art — a gallery, reimagined and owned

A contemporary art gallery in Solana Beach’s Cedros Avenue Design District: four decades of work and 60+ represented artists. The old site buried the art and was heavy to load, and the gallery was locked into a closed platform they couldn’t edit or export. We put the art and the artists front and center, on a site that feels as contemporary as the work itself — and handed the gallery full ownership of its own content.

Live preview: the real, deployed gallery site, embedded right here.

What launched

• Art front and center: a full-bleed, gallery-quality hero and artist-led browsing, so the work is the first thing you see, on a clean, contemporary design that matches the calibre of the collection.
• Far lighter and faster: WebP imagery on a global CDN. The redesign cut the imagery from roughly ~28 MB to about 1 MB, a big jump in speed, especially on a phone.
• The whole collection, migrated: 60+ artists and 1,700+ works pulled off a closed platform with no bulk export, and re-published with their original ordering, captions, and categories intact.
• Easy paths to act: clear ways to inquire about a work, explore an artist, or start an art-consulting conversation, with the inquiry form wired to the gallery’s own inbox.

The wedge · content ownership

They own it now, and they can edit it themselves

The gallery’s work had been trapped in a proprietary platform: no way to export it, no way to move, and edits that meant filing a ticket. We rebuilt the site on a headless CMS, so the content lives in a friendly editor the gallery controls, and the site rebuilds itself automatically whenever they publish a change.

• Headless CMS (Sanity): the gallery adds artists, uploads works, reorders the roster by drag-and-drop, and edits copy themselves, no developer in the loop.
• Auto-publishing: hitting Publish triggers a rebuild and the live site updates in a couple of minutes, on a global CDN with automatic HTTPS.
• Portable and theirs: content and domain both sit under the gallery’s own accounts. No lock-in, and a clean export path if they ever want to move.
• Modern stack, one owner: Sanity for content, Astro for the site, Cloudflare for hosting, domain, DNS, and email, delivered end to end by one accountable partner.