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Case study
Built to Own
Website Development
YWCA Calgary has stood with women in this city for over 115 years. When Daughter Creative reimagined the verbal ID and UX/UI, they brought Paper Crane in to build its new home: a fast, accessible WordPress site the team can run on their own, for years to come.
Detail
The brief
The YWCA internal team set out on a comprehensive rebrand from the YW visuals. They brought on Daughter Creative, one of Canada's leading design studios, to re-envision the verbal identity of YWCA Calgary and they designed a website to match.
They needed a development partner who could turn their vision into a living site without flattening any of the detail.
That is where we came in. With the YWCA team owning the visual identity and Daughter crafting the language, our job was to engineer it: flexible enough for a busy non-profit team to run themselves, open enough to never trap them, and solid enough to last.
Project partner
Daughter Creative
Daughter Creative reimagined YWCA Calgary from the ground up: the brand, the strategy, the words and nearly all of the design. We built alongside them, and shared the sitemap between our teams.
Daughter Creative
- Verbal Identity
- Content Editing
- UX/UI
- Sitemap Collaboration
Paper Crane
- Sitemap Collaboration
- Technical Design Support
- Development
- Maintenance & Hosting
Detail
Built to own
We made a deliberate call to build on WordPress. It powers roughly 40% of the web, which means a deep talent pool, no proprietary platform holding the site hostage, and a tool the YWCA team will still be able to hire for in ten years. It was also a platform that the YWCA team was familiar with - the cost to re-train needed to be factored into the equation.
From there, we built the whole thing as components:
- A custom Sage and ACF Composer theme, styled with Tailwind and bundled with Vite
- Fifty-one reusable blocks the team can mix, match and rearrange without a developer
- Accessibility considered from the first line of markup, not bolted on at the end
- Performance baked in, so every page loads fast
Detail
One kit, endless pages
Every section of the site is a block, and every block is theirs to use. The events calendar, the filterable reports library, the location map, the program directory, it all lives in a single, consistent kit.
The result is a site the YWCA team genuinely runs. Since launch they have built and edited pages on their own, with new layouts coming together in minutes instead of tickets.
Field note
From a design to a component
Each block starts as a Daughter Creative design and ends as something an editor can actually control. We translate the Figma into an ACF field schema, render it through a Blade template, and hand back a component with clear, friendly controls.
The team edits real content, not code. No developer required.
Field note
Mapped for clarity
A site this broad, crisis support, housing, programs, events, donations, careers, only works if people can find their way. We mapped the information architecture with Daughter so every visitor, including someone in a hard moment, lands exactly where they need to be.
Measured outcomes
By the numbers
A few things we are proud of from the build.
- 51
- custom blocks, one reusable kit for the team
- 0
- developer calls needed since launch
- ~50%
- faster PageSpeed scores across the board
- AA
- accessibility considered from the ground up
01
02
03
04
Detail
Still building together
Launch was not the finish line. We host and maintain the site, and we keep shaping it with the YWCA team as their programs grow.
The brand belongs to YWCA Calgary. So does the site. We just made sure it was built to last.
In closing
Built to last, theirs to grow.
Have a brand you love and a build that should match it? We partner with studios and teams to engineer sites that hold up. Let's make something that lasts.
