2025 was a challenging year. With the US regime disrupting long-time funding streams and actively attacking so many communities, it was a year of determined struggle for so many nonprofits working incredibly hard to find paths forward to continue their work.
And so with determination and work, I had four major launches—along with plenty of frequent support and site improvements work—to celebrate in 2025. Interestingly, every launch was for an organization I had worked with before. The longer I do this job, the more I put an emphasis on partnership, collaboration, and long-term relationships, because the work that results is better. I think this year showed that off.
This post is a moment to toot my own horn for the work I’ve done while always keeping things in perspective because…
Websites are just tools that support organizations as they work toward their missions to improve the world.
2019 Site Recap
Consortium for Service Innovation eCommerce-LMS Integration
Just days into the new year, I helped a fabulous long-time client, the Consortium for Service Innovation, launch their online store. As is always the case with a “small” or “simple” projects—my words, not theirs!—the detailed work to provide a user-friendly experience that met the organizations’ needs required tons of planning.
Working together closely to specify the store features, the result directly integrated their WordPress website with their Learning Management System (LMS), allowing people to purchase and automatically enroll in courses. (If you’re wondering, we used WooCommerce for the store and the LMS was SkyPrep.)
Pairing this new purchasing experience with strategic communication and engagement, this year saw a big jump in course registrations, helping more people learn from and support the Consortium’s work!
Equity in Education Center
As I often tell people rebuilding older sites, the biggest issue with old websites is that they represent the needs of an older version of an organization that no longer exists.
February 2025 brought the launch of a beautiful new website for the Equity in Education Center to support their new name and logo. Having built a site for EEC in the early 2010s, this new site modernized their communications to meet their evolving needs.
I was so pleased with how this website turned out. We worked hard to achieve a design that felt both friendly and community-oriented while also smart and full of expertise. The design integrates subtle scroll-driven animations, fun icons and graphics drawing from their redesigned logo, and support for dark mode to meet the needs of those who prefer it.
Post Cleanup Utilities plugin
Also in February, I launched a WordPress plugin on Github. What started as a quick single utility for a client project became a multi-purpose tool for helping editors quickly fix common problems in their content.
Especially when copying text from other sources, it’s common for that text to include linebreaks, “non-breaking spaces”, underlines, or problematic headings that are tedious to fix. This plugin added a number of quick one-button utilities to the WordPress Block Editor that can fix many issues instantly:
- Turn bolded paragraphs into headings
- Reset all headings to a single level
- Move all headings in a page one level up the hierarchy
- Remove underlines
- Remove linebreaks
- Remove non-breaking spaces
- Beta, not pictured: Convert a block to title case or sentence case
This was a really fun tool to build, and I quickly found that a number of colleagues found it equally helpful! When we share the learnings and improvements we make, so many more people can benefit!
Trauma Stewardship Institute
June’s launch of a new website for the Trauma Stewardship Institute showed the power of targeted improvements. The site had always had a unique and attractive visual aesthetic but needed major improvements to design and content.
Working in collaboration with a search engine consultant and copywriter, we restructured the navigation, added valuable information, and completely overhauled the WordPress backend to showcase the books, podcasts, speaking, and consulting work of Laura van Dernoot Lipsky.
Using the new WordPress “Site Editor” experience to speed up development time, we focused on improving upon the solid design foundation, making sure the site is easy and quick to edit, and helping people connect with Laura and her work.
Ile Kimoyo
June was a busy month! Two weeks after the last launch brought the launch of Ile Kimoyo’s new website.
Working in partnership with Pyramid Communications, I took their designs and turned them into a user-friendly website for Ile Kimoyo, formerly the BIPOC ED Coalition of Washington State. Like their last site, this site used expressive brush strokes inspired by water and waves that could be applied by anyone with access to the site.
The new brand also featured inspiration from Adinkra symbols that appear throughout the site alongside the beautiful professional photography that makes the work of this organization sing.
This website was the product of thoughtful and intentional growth and a commitment to supporting community and each other. I was lucky to get to work on the project.
More Open Source Updates
Throughout the year, I also continued working on the other tools I build to support my clients and anyone else who finds the tools useful.
- I had one significant update for the MRW Simplified Editor plugin to make sure it supported WordPress version 6.9.
- I added Vimeo support and improved the features for the Enhanced Embed Block plugins that automatically makes YouTube and Vimeo videos load immensely faster and with more privacy.
- I made one last big update to my MRW Accordion plugin so that it could upgrade to the new official WordPress Accordion block. I’m happy to let that one go in favor of a new officially supported solution.
- I was able to fix a few long-standing bugs with my Clicky Menus script for drop-down navigation menu.
- Building on the work of others, I built a new WordPress plugin to enable setting a focal point for featured images. Much like my Post Cleanup Utilities, I found myself immediately using this one on multiple sites because it was so darn useful!
- I continue to improve and publish my WordPress “starter theme” so I can share my best practices for building new WordPress sites. I learn so much from other people who do the same, and so I’m happy to return the favor.
If you haven’t noticed yet, it’s 2026 and that means I already have a few launches expected in the next couple months. (Are all my years this front-loaded? I should go back and look some other time…)
This year brings so much uncertainty, but I plan to stay committed to thoughtfully supporting organizations that are working to make the world a better place in ways big and small. They all matter, and I know I can play a small but important role in supporting their work.