Pomona Valley
Bird Alliance.
A full website redesign for a beloved Southern California birding community — built to welcome first-time observers and lifelong naturalists alike.
Overview.
Pomona Valley Bird Alliance is a chapter of the National Audubon Society serving the Pomona Valley and beyond. Their existing site had grown organically over many years, but lacked the direction, warmth, and clarity needed to appeal to newcomers of the birding community.
Aside from ongoing maintenance and updates, the goal is a ground-up redesign to support UX funnels that encourage and teach new birders, engage in community inclusion, strengthen ties to bird conservation groups, as well as honoring a community that has championed birds and people in the valley for over 50 years.
Approach.
The design system is built around a simple but bold black and white hierarchy of components with vivid highlighter pastel colors to draw the eye. It is designed to be inviting and youthful, while retaining a sense of prestige and elegance associated with the National Audubon Society.
The color palette is grounded in the warm yellows and sage greens of a Southern California summer morning — evoking the outdoors while remaining bold and playful.
The site is currently locked into a Network Solutions contract, and as a WordPress instance suffers from laggy server response times. As such, all components on the new website are being hand-coded in HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — no framework overhead or database to exploit — ensuring the site stays fast and is easily maintainable and secure for the long-term.