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CHN Housing Partners: A mission-driven website redesign to support stability, equity, and growth

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.

Visit chnhousingpartners.org
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Objectives

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:

  • Simplify and clarify program navigation for housing applicants.
  • Showcase CHN’s B2B consulting capabilities and development portfolio.
  • Encourage donor engagement and online contributions.
  • Improve website performance and page load times.
  • Offer CHN’s team a more intuitive page editing experience.
  • Lay the technical groundwork for future features like housing search and API integrations.

 

Our Approach

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.

 

Measurable Results

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

 

What’s Next

In Phase II, we’ll extend the site’s functionality to include:

  • A custom housing listing search tool
  • Yardi/RentCafe API integration for live housing availability
  • Additional enhancements to support fundraising and campaign visibility

Key Features:

  • Website Redesign & Development: A mobile-optimized, user-friendly interface designed to be scalable and compliant with accessibility best practices.
  • CMS Implementation: Built on Umbraco using uSkinned Site Builder for easy and flexible content editing.
  • Content & SEO Strategy: Improved content architecture, navigability, and keyword-targeting to increase organic visibility.
  • Salesforce Integration: Lead forms integrated with CHN’s Salesforce CRM for streamlined intake and follow-up.
  • Performance Optimization: Core Web Vitals–driven architecture for faster load times and improved Lighthouse scores.

Our Work
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