Burt Foundation

The Nathan B. and Florence R. Burt Foundation has funded early childhood education and high school completion in Colorado since 1984. The website was a few pages of text under a stock skyline, and the grant process ran through email with no systemized process. The rebuild came in two parts: a grant portal on Next.js and Supabase, and a website as a custom-coded block theme in WordPress, which holds the layout and design fixed and lets the client edit the copy and imagery.

The board was running a community logo contest, so the identity had to work with a mark nobody had drawn yet. We decided on a modular visual style that could be molded to fit future design decisions. I presented the board with 11 palettes to choose from, and navy and amber won.

Later, the logo contest yielded a mountain-themed logo in off-brand Colorado flag colors, with educational motifs. I worked with the designer, Jessica Retskin, to bring it into the system. The mountain stayed, the colors moved to the navy and amber, and the motifs were removed to allow the site’s established typography to shine.

Every section is a block pattern locked to content only. The board can change the text and swap the images, and cannot move, delete or restyle a section. The FAQ is the exception, the one list that grows. The board itself is a Board and Staff post type with a featured toggle, so the About page lays out however many people are in it.

Two tools back this up. One reads every published page out of the database and fails the deploy if a section has lost its lock. The other rebuilds pages from the patterns and refuses to touch any page someone has edited in WordPress since. Content gets edited on the site and design gets edited in the theme.

The portal was a collaborative effort. We first explored the current grant process: applications split across reviewers by hand, no standardization or rubric, ineligible organizations got all the way to a decision, and no record of who had been awarded what.

After understanding in-depth the foundation’s grant cycle structure, we built a comprehensive feature list enabling the director and board members to systemically participate in the grant process: one cycle at a time, LOI first and then invited applications, reviewers judging LOIs and applications off of predefined criteria, simplified eligibility criteria, in-system messaging, an LLM help chatbot with training, and blast email notifications.

The site is live, with the portal linked from every page and six redirects covering every URL the old site had. The director edits copy on the live site herself, and admin also has a route to modifying the live site via SSH.