Maroon 9 Community Enrichment Organization empowers Fort Worth youth through theatre arts and advocates for Sickle Cell Disease awareness. Their existing Wix site was failing their mission. We audited it, specified a replacement, and shipped it.
| Client | Maroon 9 Community Enrichment Organization |
| Role | PM & Lead Dev |
| Timeline | Jan – May 2026 |
| Pages | 7 delivered |
| Course | CTEC 4350 — UTA |
| Status | Live & deployed |
The original maroon9.org was built on Wix and had accumulated years of structural debt. A formal UX and accessibility audit conducted in March 2026 identified 25 issues across usability, accessibility, visual design, and conversion effectiveness.
The most damaging: there was no visible navigation menu anywhere on the site. Pages were reachable only if you already knew the URL. The About page lived at /blank, the Why Arts page at /blank-2. The footer contained only a copyright notice. The homepage hero had no headline, no CTA, and no indication of what the organization did.
We didn’t start with code. The first deliverable was a client survey to understand what the organization actually needed — programs, staff workflows, event cadence, and what a successful handoff looked like. That survey informed every decision downstream.
Administered a structured intake questionnaire to understand Maroon 9’s programs, audience, content ownership model, and site goals. Findings shaped the sitemap and feature scope.
Conducted a formal audit of the existing Wix site covering usability, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, visual design, and conversion effectiveness. Produced a prioritized 10-item remediation plan across 25 findings.
Documented a content delivery plan, landing page redesign spec, and a full database schema for a dynamic calendar and events system — including a phased implementation roadmap.
Led development of a 7-page PHP site using shared includes, JSON-driven content (events, programs), a staff portal, PayPal donation integration, responsive layout, and a custom video production script for CapCut.
Ran a structured usability test against 6 task scenarios covering program discovery, donation flow, enrollment paths, and contact form completion. Produced a formal report documenting 5 issues with severity ratings and fix recommendations.
Events and programs are loaded from events.json and programs.json rather than hardcoded HTML. The client can update content without touching code — a deliberate handoff decision based on their non-technical staff profile.
Nav, head, and footer are shared via includes/layout.php. Any global change — a nav link, a footer CTA, a new meta tag — propagates instantly across all 7 pages. This solved the exact kind of drift that made the original Wix site inconsistent.
Rather than linking to an external donate page, the Donate button connects directly to a live PayPal hosted button. Every donation CTA on the site points to the same endpoint, making the conversion path consistent.
A portal.php page was built for internal staff use, gated separately from the public site. This addressed a workflow gap identified in the client survey — staff needed access to forms and records the public shouldn’t see.
The redesigned site launched with clear navigation, semantic URLs, a hero with a headline and dual CTA, an impact statistics section, a fully populated footer, and accessible markup that passes all five accessibility checks run during usability testing.
Every issue flagged in the original audit — missing navigation, broken URL slugs, empty footer, stale content, inaccessible structure — was resolved in the rebuild. The usability test of our own deliverable returned zero console errors, all images loading, and clean mobile rendering at 390px.
The five issues our usability test did surface (including a personal Google Calendar exposed on the Programs page and outdated 2025 event dates) were documented with severity ratings and fix recommendations — so the client has a clear remediation path after handoff.