The Pacific Open Heart Association (POHA) is a registered charitable organization based in the Lower Mainland that supports heart surgery patients and their families throughout their recovery. Volunteers visit patients in hospitals across the Lower Mainland to provide non-medical support, share resources and information, and offer encouragement. The organization also raises funds to purchase medical equipment, and memberships are available to members of the public who wish to support heart patients.
POHA approached Caorda to modernize its aging website. Having been built many years earlier, the site no longer reflected current web standards or the needs of its users. It was difficult to manage, lacked a fully responsive design for mobile devices, and no longer provided the modern user experience that visitors expect. A comprehensive redesign was needed to create a secure, accessible, and mobile-friendly website that would better serve patients, volunteers, donors, and other stakeholders.
Like many non-profit organizations, POHA balances a wide range of priorities within a limited budget. While an updated website was essential, the project also needed to remain cost-effective so that as much funding as possible could continue to support the organization’s mission.
Caorda’s team began the project by developing a strategic plan for the rebuild, with a focus on efficiency and collaboration across all departments. An updated website design was then created to better reflect the organization’s mission and improve user journeys to the most important content. Caorda’s development team brought the new design to life using WordPress with Elementor—a platform well suited to non-profit organizations because it enables staff to update website content in-house without relying on a developer.
All existing content was carefully migrated to the new website as development progressed. Because the previous site’s pages had built up years of authority in Google Search, Caorda’s digital marketing team developed a detailed migration strategy to preserve search rankings and ensure existing traffic was seamlessly redirected to the appropriate new pages. Finally, the website was launched by Caorda’s IT team and hosted on the company’s local servers in Vancouver, BC.
The result is a modern, secure, and responsive website that better supports POHA’s mission and will serve the organization, its volunteers, and the community for many years to come. A website built with care—for an organization built on compassion.
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