KirkCats nonprofit website

Introduction #

KirkCats is a volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Atlanta that cares for homeless community cats in the area through Trap-Neuter-Return-Care (TNRC). For years, they have been operating entirely as a Facebook Group, but this makes it difficult to help members of the community who are not on Facebook. It was also challenging to share resources through the Facebook Group, where posts are prioritized by recency rather than helpfulness. After the nonprofit had a large corporate donation rescinded in 2023 due to the group not having a website, they reached out to me to finally put one together.

Requirements #

Upon meeting with one of the leaders of KirkCats, I learned that they had only three absolute requirements for website:

1. It needs to be editable by members of the organization who don't know how to write code. This meant that my preferred approach of building a simple website consisting of HTML and CSS files alone wouldn't be enough, since they would also need a simple user interface to make edits.

2. It needs to be accessible to all members of the community. It's important to the organization that anyone in the Atlanta area who needs KirkCats is able to get the information they need about the organization. This was very exciting to me, as so rarely is accessibility one of the top priorities for stakeholders of my work.

3. It needs to cost very little, if anything. Like most nonprofits, KirkCats would prefer to spend as little as possible on overhead costs like website hosting so they can spend on what matters: their mission of helping stray cats in Atlanta.

Process #

I knew that, regardless of how the website was built, I wanted the output to be static HTML files in the end, making it a perfect candidate for a static site generator like Eleventy. What I didn't know was how to make it easy for non-technical members of the KirkCats organization to edit the content of that site without touching any code.

Luckily, someone had already figured this out for me! I was able to follow along with Henry Desroches's incredibly helpful guide for using Contentful, a user-friendly content management system, to power the content of the Eleventy website. By following that guide and making adjustments as needed, I made the website's content, including images and media files, fully editable through Contentful. Then all I had to do was build the website's layout to be flexible and allow for the content to take the focus.

Outcome #

In the end, the entire cost of the website ended up being $7.46, the cost for me to register the kirkcats.org domain through Namecheap. Beyond the annual domain renewal, which I plan to just consider a donation to the organization, the website has no ongoing costs. The website is hosted for free through Netlify's free tier, and the content of the website is managed entirely through Contentful's free tier. This is a huge cost savings over the alternative KirkCats was considering: paying Squarespace a minimum of $16/month for a basic website.

Visit website // See GitHub repo

Behind the scenes #

Now, anytime a member of the KirkCats organization wants to edit content on the website, they simply log into Contentful and use its user-friendly interface to make edits:

As soon as they click the Publish changes button, Contentful makes a call to a Netlify build hook I set up to rebuild the website with the latest content:

Once that build completes (takes less than 30 seconds), the changes are live! Adding new pages, images, and files is similarly easy through the Contentful UI.

I was so pleasantly surprised by how simple it was to set all this up. While such a simple setup may not meet the needs of all organizations, I do believe it could meet the needs of many and save them hundreds of dollars each year over using a full-featured website builder like Squarespace or Wix, allowing them to use more of their money towards their organization's mission.