Little Artists

Little Artists is a Houston nonprofit, founded and run by a friend of mine, that teaches free art lessons to kids ages 6 to 12 at the Chinese Civic Center. This summer it's carrying the program to Accra, Ghana: a week of instruction at a local school, closing with an arts festival. Online, none of that came through. The old site was dated, rough on phones, and had no working way to sign a student up or support the trip. I joined as Director of Technology & Innovation to fix that.

The full redesign, treated like a paying client's build. I designed five complete homepage directions and presented them for review; the executive director picked one, Meadow, and her feedback shipped the same night. The live site is hand-built static HTML: a student sign-up form, a live countdown to the Ghana departure, expandable team bios, donate buttons wired to the real campaign, and structured data that tells search engines exactly what the organization is. Then I cut the domain over from the old host and relaunched littleartistsus.org.

Five design directions pitched; one picked, revised overnight, and replacing the old site on the real domain the next day. Every image converted to WebP, cutting the page's image weight by nearly three quarters so it loads fast on a parent's phone. And the deadline that mattered was met: the new site went live less than a week before the team's flight to Accra. [E-14]

Every build before this one had an invoice attached. This one pays differently: a parent finds a free art class, a donor understands the Ghana trip, and an organization I believe in finally looks as real online as it is in the room. It also made the title real. Director of Technology & Innovation isn't a line on a form here; it means the site, the domain, and everything with a power button is mine to keep working.