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King's Heritage Foundation Website

I built this site as a volunteer for a children's home in Ijebu Ode. It gave them a public face and helped them win over NGN 800,000 in foundation funding.

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King's Heritage Missionary Home homepage with the headline 'Every child deserves a heritage of hope' over a photo of smiling children

Overview

I was volunteering as a digital literacy instructor at King's Heritage Missionary Home when it became obvious that the biggest thing holding them back was not effort, it was visibility. They were caring for orphans, vulnerable children, widows and displaced persons in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, and had been doing it since 2013, but there was nothing online a donor or partner could look at. So I offered to build them a website, for free, and stayed on to maintain it.

The problem

Grant officers and individual donors kept asking the same question: can we see something? The home had photos on a phone, a paper record of the children they supported, and a reputation that only travelled by word of mouth. Without a site they could point to, every funding conversation started from scratch, and they had no way to explain what they actually do, which is not just shelter, but food, healthcare, education and legal advocacy.

No online presence at all; donors had nothing to verify
Their work spanned seven distinct areas of need that were hard to explain verbally
Most of their audience is on mobile and on metered data in Nigeria
No one on staff had the technical skill to run a site after handover

What I did

I sat with the founders and worked out how they describe their own mission, then structured the site around it rather than around a template. The seven cardinal needs they meet (food, shelter, healthcare, education, justice, spiritual care and community) became the spine of the navigation, so a first-time visitor understands the scope of the work within one scroll. The homepage leads with a single clear promise, a real photograph of the children they serve, and two paths: support a child, or read the story first.

Interviewed the founders and rewrote their material into plain, dignified copy
Built the sitemap around the seven needs, plus Programs, Impact, Get Involved and Contact
Designed a homepage hero that carries the mission, the location and the years of service at a glance
Chose photography and language that presents the children with dignity, not pity
Put a persistent Donate action in the header on every page

Building it

I built the site on WordPress deliberately, because the handover mattered more than my preferences, the team needed to add news and photos themselves after I stepped back. I kept the page weight low, compressed every image, and tested the whole thing on a slow mobile connection, since that is how most Nigerian visitors would reach it. Contact and donation enquiries route straight to an inbox the team actually checks.

Mobile-first responsive layout, tested on low-bandwidth connections
Compressed imagery and lean pages to keep load times low on 3G
Readable type sizes, strong colour contrast and descriptive alt text throughout
On-page SEO and structured metadata so the home surfaces in local searches
Trained two staff members to publish updates and manage enquiries themselves

The outcome

The site became the thing they send first. It supported the outreach that helped secure over NGN 800,000 in funding from the David Adeleke Foundation, and it gave the home a credible, permanent reference point for donors, volunteers and partners. Years on, the team is still publishing to it without me.