faith250 Website
2025
faith250 is a program that brings local communities together by creating multifaith centered around the study of classic American texts in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The existing site was built on a platform intended for blogs, which made it increasingly difficult for users to find critical information and resources. I was tasked with designing and building a new site to house all of the static information, while they would work on repurposing the old site to be focused on storytelling.
To begin the process, I sat down with the team to figure out what pages and content would be needed for the new site. As we built a sitemap as a team, it became clear that accessibility and usability would be incredibly important in this project.
I then began wireframing a few of the key page types to begin figuring out the design of the site. I was asked to build the site on Squarespace, so I knew that the layouts and features could not be too complex.
Because the branding for faith250 was already built by Dirty Napkin, I was able to integrate the visual identity into the personality of the site. The brand has an interesting mix of simplicity with a bit of organized chaos. I decided to give the pages wide margins on the sides and create unique “title card” compositions for the top of each page that utilize the colorful and dynamic brand elements.
Once I started the development process, I quickly realized that even though I had simplified my design in anticipation of Squarespace limitations, there were important elements and features that the platform could not natively support. I ended up writing a bunch of HTML, JS and SCSS/CSS to get the site to appear as I wanted it. A large portion of this effort went into responsive layouts, as Squarespace offers only a single alternate layout for mobile, which resulted in undesired spacing and scaling issues when viewing on tablets.
In the end, I was able to create a comprehensive, user-friendly site where users of varying tech abilities could easily locate information and resources. Since launch, the site has significantly optimized operations internally and externally, and is allowing for significantly faster growth in program participation and engagement.