Nigerian non-profit —
OjayAjaifia Foundation
From mobile-first sketches, to a home for the work.
A Nigerian foundation lifting children with disabilities through education, healthcare, therapy and community needed a digital home that built trust as quickly as the cause deserves.
- Project
- Foundation website rebuild
- For
- Donors, volunteers, partners, parents
- Stack
- HTML · PHP · MySQL · MailerLite · Paystack
- Year
- 2026
Brief01
The brief
Replace a rigid WordPress site with one the foundation can actually run themselves.
OjayAjaifia Foundation does serious work in Nigeria — education, healthcare, therapy and community for children with disabilities. Their existing website was built on WordPress, which is popular but quite rigid — it made adding custom features or specific edits difficult, and the foundation was effectively locked out of their own site.
A new version was built from scratch in its place, designed to be easier to update and more tailored to the organisation's needs. No charity stock photography, no tropes — a real home for real work, with the foundation's own faces and numbers doing the storytelling.
How it works01b
What the rebuild changed
Three new dynamic surfaces, a private admin, and the two things every NGO website needs: a newsletter and a donations path that actually works.
- 01
Three pages that update without a developer.
Live Activities, Media Gallery, and Journal — each pulls fresh content the moment staff add it. The two most recent activities surface on the home page automatically.
- 02
An admin staff can actually use.
A private dashboard for adding, previewing, publishing, and deleting content. Form-based and plain-English — closer to writing an email than editing a website.
- 03
Email — MailerLite.
Visitors can subscribe to a quiet, infrequent newsletter. The free tier covers up to 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month — enough headroom for years of growth.
- 04
Donations — Paystack.
Preset amounts (₦2,000, ₦5,000, ₦10,000) each paired with what they actually buy — "₦5,000 can provide learning aids for one child", "₦10,000 can fund a therapy session." Concrete impact, not abstract giving.
Constraints02
What shaped it
Four pressures that drove every layout decision.
Mobile-first, properly.
Most Nigerian visitors arrive on a phone over a cellular connection. The phone is where the design starts — not where it gets compressed to fit at the end.
Donor trust is statistical and visual.
A stranger deciding to give wants to see the work, not read about it. Stats-led storytelling reads more honestly than slogans.
Photography from the work itself.
Real children, real programmes, real Nigerian context. No stock library could carry the credibility the foundation has already earned in person.
Eight pages, all doing real jobs.
Home, About, Programmes, Media, Blog, Contact, Donation, Volunteer. A small site — but every page is a path someone takes for a reason.
Concept03
The thinking, on paper
Two concept artefacts: the phone-sized prototype, and the whole-site Figma board that came before the build.
Decisions04
How we got there
Four calls that shaped the architecture before the colours were settled.
- 01
Mobile-first prototype before any desktop screen.
The site's narrowest layout had to read clean before its widest one earned the right to exist. Every section was sketched at phone width first.
- 02
The whole site, planned at once.
Eight pages on a single Figma board so the information architecture was decided before any pixel went final. Seeing the whole map at once stopped late-stage shuffling.
- 03
Stats and faces, not slogans.
"Every child deserves a chance to shine" sits over real children, real numbers, real programmes. The hero is a statement of intent grounded in evidence.
- 04
Donate and volunteer paths within reach everywhere.
A foundation's website serves the work — not its own architecture. Both pathways are reachable from any screen, in two clicks at most.
Result05
Where it is today
Rebuild and migration: shipped. Dynamic pages, admin dashboard, and the Paystack donations front-end are all live. The old WordPress backup is preserved safely in case anything ever needs to be cross-referenced.
Two small backend steps remain: the foundation creating its MailerLite account so the newsletter form can connect, and a brief joint session to verify Paystack with the foundation's OTP. Once those land, the site is feature-complete.
The delivered site
Five screens from the live site — hero, programmes, stories from the field, donate, volunteer.
In closing —
A small site, doing a serious job. Mobile-first by physics, not by trend.