The situation when I arrived
A charitable hospital that does considerably more than people assume a charity can. Corneal transplants and an eye bank. Oral and breast cancer care. Dialysis given free. Medical camps that travel out to people who cannot travel in. Teacher training on top of all of it.
Almost none of that reached anybody through a screen. The organisation's older domain had been compromised and was serving injected spam, so the one address a person might have found was carrying somebody else's advertising. The work itself, the part worth funding, had no page of its own anywhere.
A hospital like this does not need a brochure. It needs a route that runs from a stranger's question to a donation that pays for a named procedure, and it needs every word along that route to be true.
What I folded
- Copy written from the hospital's own documents, and nothing else. Every clinical line came from papers the hospital wrote and approved. On a medical charity an invented detail is not a copy error, it is a liability. Nothing was added because it read well.
- The whole thing hand built, with no page builder anywhere near it. The home page and the donation page are hand written templates, not blocks dragged onto a grid. That is why they behave the way they do, and why any single line of either can be changed precisely, years from now, without touching the rest.
- A donation page that prices the work honestly. Not one button and a hopeful box. A schedule, a line for each thing the hospital actually does, and what that thing costs to fund. Screening a schoolchild sits at one end. A corneal graft sits at the other, two hundred times the amount. The donor chooses an outcome rather than a sum.
- A clean break from the compromised domain. The new site stands on its own foundation and inherited nothing from the address that had been injected. I did not assume a cause I could not prove. I assumed the exposure and built so it could not carry across.
- Measurement wired in on the first day, not bolted on later. Analytics, search reporting and a dashboard themed for the finance lead and the trustees, so that the question every board eventually asks has an answer that does not depend on me being in the room.
Every line drawn by hand
A donor chooses the outcome, not the amount.
What moved
The site is live, the donation route runs end to end from a page to a payment, and the reporting sits behind it. What remains is the part that actually counts, which is the first stranger who reads a page, believes it, and funds a procedure.
The rest of what I am owed on this engagement is not due until that happens. It is written that way on purpose.
What this proves
A site, a working donation route and the reporting on top of both, from one pair of hands, with the client's own documents as the only source for anything a patient might rely on.
And where the work is worth doing, I will carry part of the risk of it. The last of this fee is earned by a result rather than by the hours, which is the same standard I ask every number on this site to meet.
Every clinical line on that site came out of the hospital's own papers. Not one of them was written to sound better.
How the copy was sourced