From Vision to Website: Empowering a Local Nonprofit Online

Pueblo Unido PDX (PU) is a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit that helps members of the community who are facing deportation or are currently in detention by providing them with legal representation and resources. When I started volunteering for PU, I immediately asked if I could build a website to help increase brand awareness and also showcase what the org could do for people.

I worked with the founders of PU to plan out how the site architecture would map out, and what pages might be needed. We were able to quickly map out all the pages that would be needed.

I designed the website in the browser, without the use of a design tool like Figma and Adobe XD. This was due to my experience at the time being largely development-driven, and I felt most comfortable with that approach. Using vanilla HTML and CSS turned out to be the best tech stack for this project because it allowed forthcoming developers to be able to hop onto the project and contribute rather quickly. Not having to learn a new tech stack or framework meant that developers who worked with web technology in the past could work on the website.

The website was stored on Github for easy collaboration with other developers. I build a new organization in Github so that the code could be stored in a safe space, where other volunteers could join and contribute after they were onboarded.

One of the primary goals of the PU website was to be able to provide both English and Spanish translations for all of the text. I helped to guide new volunteers in creating this functionality, which required a bit of help from Jekyll templating in order to accomplish this. Over time, these same volunteers worked to help make copy updates, improve styles, and fix bugs.

While the site has stood the test of time by being live for over 5 years, the time has come to bring it into the future! Just like the website you are currently viewing, the PU site will be migrated to NextJS with a Contentful backend, deployed on Vercel. This will improve SEO, help non-technical team members to make copy edits, and allow more rapid iteration of styles and visual improvements.

Want to see the current Pueblo Unido PDX website? Click here!