CHN engaged Aztek to lead a full website redesign project aimed at improving the digital experience for a diverse audience of clients, community partners, donors, and businesses. The new website needed to reflect the organization's growing impact, streamline access to critical housing programs, and provide CHN with a more modern, flexible content management platform.
The primary objective was to create an accessible, user-centered website experience that supports CHN’s service delivery and organizational storytelling. Specifically, the redesign needed to:
We rebuilt the site from the ground up on the Umbraco CMS , leveraging the uSkinned Site Builder, a flexible and powerful theme-based toolkit that gives CHN full control over content creation and layout. This solution empowers CHN's team to make frequent updates without developer involvement, which is critical for an organization managing dynamic programs and services.
Design inspiration was drawn from CHN’s Detroit Housing Network site and refined through their brand guidelines. The new experience is clean, modern, mobile-friendly, and accessibility-forward.
We also developed a content strategy to restructure complex program data and unify the site’s messaging around CHN’s mission, services, and impact. Pages were restructured to improve SEO performance and facilitate easier conversion paths for applications, donations, and consulting outreach.
The transformation wasn’t just visual, it was deeply technical. CHN’s legacy website struggled with load times, accessibility limitations, and SEO performance. After launching the redesigned site, Lighthouse audit scores saw major improvements across every category:
| Metric | Before Redesign | After Redesign |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 44 | 93 |
| Accessibility | 81 | 100 |
| Best Practices | 100 | 100 |
| SEO | 77 | 100 |
| First Contentful Paint | >3s (Est.) | 1.1s |
| Largest Contentful Paint | >4s (Est.) | 1.3s |
| Total Blocking Time | ~300–500ms (Est.) | 100ms |
In Phase II, we’ll extend the site’s functionality to include:
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