A website as strong as the work behind it.
A ground-up redesign and rebuild of yadkinriverkeeper.org — photography-forward, built to be owned by your team, and engineered to be found.
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A ground-up redesign and rebuild of yadkinriverkeeper.org — photography-forward, built to be owned by your team, and engineered to be found.
Yadkin Valley Riverkeeper has 17 years of river monitoring, real legal victories, a weekly Swim Guide, and a jurisdiction spanning 21 counties. The problem isn't the organization — it's the site representing it, and a rebuild that stalled for two years.
We propose a brand-new, custom WordPress site — designed and built from scratch, photography-forward, easy for your team to manage, and engineered from day one to be found by both search engines and AI answer engines. The investment is weighted toward doing it right once, so the ongoing cost of ownership stays low.
The organization has been trying to launch a new website for about two years. The previous agency dragged the project out, communicated poorly, and has been reluctant to hand over assets. A staging site exists and is useful as a reference — but not as a foundation.
The current build is on Divi, a page-builder with real limits on performance, accessibility, and maintainability — plus legal and ownership questions around reusing another agency's code. Our recommendation: a clean rebuild.
Yadkin Valley Riverkeeper will lead a content audit of the staging site, in partnership with Capture Public Relations & Marketing — reviewing copy for accuracy, catching outdated information, and finalizing what belongs. Approved content is then delivered to us to build around, and unlocks the project start.
Much of the raw material is strong: excellent photography, a distinctive brand identity, and specific, credible mission content. We're not starting from nothing — we're giving strong material the home it deserves.
To ground the conversation, we've selected two leading-edge nonprofit sites as inspiration and reference points. They show — better than any description — the caliber of site we want to build for Yadkin Valley Riverkeeper.
Large, emotive imagery that carries the mission before a word is read. Your river photography is already excellent — we build the design around it.
Intuitive architecture — no dead ends, no six competing donation buttons, no burying the Swim Guide three clicks deep.
Leading with concrete outcomes — "we forced the removal of 6.5 million tons of coal ash from your watershed" — not generic nonprofit language.
These are starting points, not templates — a shared visual vocabulary to react to. The final direction will be unmistakably, authentically Yadkin while reaching the standard these comparables set.
We ran four independent audits of the staging site — SEO, two AI-readiness (GEO) audits, and a comprehensive UX/accessibility review across six frameworks. The findings make the case clearly.
Broken conversion flows: a volunteer form whose button reads "Donate Now!", a story form asking for a billing address, and no submission confirmations anywhere.
Doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 AA — no skip links, missing alt text, no keyboard focus indicators. Much of it is baked into the Divi platform.
No structured data, no sitemap, no machine-readable identity — so AI answer engines can't confidently cite you, even when you should be the definitive source.
Many of these issues are baked into the platform and how the previous site was assembled. We could patch symptoms indefinitely — or build a foundation where these problems simply don't exist.
A clean, custom build resolves the accessibility, structure, schema, and form-integrity issues as a natural byproduct of building it correctly — not as an endless list of patches. It's not just a nicer-looking site. It's a structurally sound one.
Custom homepage and key interior templates built around your photography and brand. A full design system — type scale, color, buttons, components — plus curated iconography and responsive layouts across every device.
A brand-new custom WordPress theme, from scratch — no Divi, no inherited code. A modular system flexible enough to build anything, but structured so staff can't accidentally break the design. You self-manage 80–90% of content after a short walkthrough.
Donation, event-registration, and volunteer forms integrated from your ExceedFurther platform into branded pages — with clean, correctly-labeled CTAs and success redirects, fixing the confusing forms the audit flagged.
Assumptions: YRK provides ExceedFurther admin access. The final transactional step remains on Arreva's secure hosted forms, which carry some of Arreva's own styling — we brand everything around them, but there's a fidelity ceiling on the forms themselves, standard for any third-party fundraising platform. Your account's native ExceedFurther forms (not the Qgiv interface) are the confirmed integration path.
Structured data, XML sitemap, complete meta and Open Graph tags, semantic accessible HTML, llms.txt, performance optimization, and Search Console setup — so you're the source that gets cited.
The upfront investment goes disproportionately into a clean, modular CMS your team can operate confidently.
Editing text, swapping photos, posting news, updating programs, adding events — all doable without touching code, and without breaking the layout. A well-built CMS is the difference between a website you own and one you rent from your agency. That's the whole point: build it right now, so you need very little of our time later.
Design, custom WordPress build & CMS, Arreva/ExceedFurther integration, and SEO/GEO launch configuration. Everything to do with building and launching the site.
The content audit, copywriting, and content finalization — alongside YRK. Katie and Lane (YRK) and Rebecca (Capture) own and approve all copy before it reaches the site.
Certain supporting graphics may fall to either party depending on what the design calls for. We'll define this clearly during the design phase.
Each phase flows into the next as its dependencies are met. The project formally begins once approved copy is in hand.
Finalize sitemap and information architecture, confirm ExceedFurther access and the forms to integrate, assess existing photography and assets — coordinating to acquire more if the design needs them — and lock the content structure.
Homepage concept plus key interior templates, presented for review and revision. Where the comparable-caliber direction takes concrete shape.
The from-scratch WordPress theme and modular CMS come to life in staging, with the structural fixes applied. The heart of the project.
Forms integrated and tested. Schema, sitemap, meta data, llms.txt, and performance work applied.
Cross-browser and mobile QA, accessibility verification, final revisions, team walkthrough, and go-live on yadkinriverkeeper.org.
Timeline: a general estimate of 8–12 weeks from approved content. The clock starts when approved copy is ready — not at signing. There's no hard external deadline, so we can do this properly rather than rushed.
A few variables genuinely affect the final figure — we'd rather be transparent than pad a fixed price.
We'll confirm where in the range the project lands after Phase 1 discovery, when these unknowns are resolved.
Where new photography or supporting graphics turn out to be needed, we'll flag it and help coordinate sourcing — but producing that material isn't part of our scope.
We'd be glad to build it — clean, custom, photography-forward, and truly yours to own.
Read the full written proposal →