Marketing strategy

5 Min read

Website Refresh: Hill Country Conservancy

Clearcraft worked with Hill Country Conservancy to simplify the way website visitors get information, join programs and make donations. 

Great websites honor organizations with a rich history

Hill Country Conservancy was established in January 2000, so they’ve grown up with the internet. The HCC website evolved from a blogroll into a resource for information about conservation and its impact in Central Texas.

Organizations with a rich history like HCC’s still need websites that feel current. It’s the job of your website to reliably deliver the right information to different audiences so they can take real-world action. The Hill Country Conservancy website helps their supporter base understand the impact of donations and gives them a path to donate. And it helps landowners learn what it takes to conserve property and how they can start the process.

In 2025, Hill Country Conservancy asked Clearcraft how they might simplify the way these audiences got to the information they needed.

Visitors to the website were having trouble navigating between information pages, and design limitations on the DonorPerfect donation form created challenges to submitting a donation. Both of these issues were magnified on mobile screens, where about half of HCC’s traffic comes in.

Together, we identified core goals for the customer-facing elements of the refresh that would address these issues. Plus, we named some priorities to make sure the HCC team could keep future content on-brand and get marketing value from their web property.

How WE'll Refresh User Experiences

  • Simplify the donation experience
  • Improve user navigation
  • Correct display issues on mobile screen sizes
  • Unify the visual experience across all pages

Usability Priorities

  • Make the updated design system usable
  • Connect and troubleshoot Google Analytics data collection
  • The big one: be budget-conscious

How we hit the goal set

Old donation page New donation page

First: Troubleshoot Google Analytics

Maybe not where you’d expect a redesign to start! But here’s the thinking: if a primary goal for the work is to improve the user experience, we first need to be able to see what users experience

The existing implementation of Google Analytics used a WordPress plugin, and the team wasn’t sure if they could trust the data. We identified that the website couldn’t track form submissions from DonorPerfect’s embedded form, and the site structure made it difficult to understand how users reached the donation form.

Once we found what wasn’t working, here’s what we fixed:

  • Reconfigured GA4 to correctly measure traffic
  • Created custom events to understand engagement with donation forms
  • Created custom session tracking to understand user journeys

Improve the donation experience

With a better understanding of user behavior, we set out to improve the donation form itself and the data it was sending back to reporting tools.

Ultimately, we determined there were several critical shortcomings with the existing DonorPerfect donation form:

• Form styling and flow weren’t customizable

• Engagement and transaction data weren’t captured in Google Analytics

• Submission redirects wern’t supported

So, we encouraged Hill Country Conservancy to adopt GiveCloud (which only months later would be acquired by DonorPerfect), which allowed custom styling, sends event data and supports custom redirects, which help with measurement. 

The built-in integration with DonorPerfect’s database also meant there was really no migration necessary. We simply swapped DonorPerfect’s iframe-based form for a link to GiveCloud’s on-page “Giving Experience.”

Donation buttons were made more prominent in the site header, footer and page content, to make sure users see a path to donate on every page they visit. Then, new pages were built as entry points to program sign-ups, and we custom-coded the corresponding GiveCloud payment pages to match the content and style of the info pages on hillcountryconservancy.org. 

Since relaunching in early June, 2026 the improved donation experience and more prominent navigation to payment forms helped to nearly triple the number of completed donations as compared to last summer, lifting the total dollar amount received by more than double, too. 

Improve user navigation

With key conversion pages overhauled, giving users clear paths to information was the next priority.

The existing navigation menu on the website was originally implemented in 2016. Believe it or not, most people used the internet on desktop computers back then (yes, that really was a whole decade ago). To make the whole menu more accessible, we aimed for high-contrast colors, larger text sizes and screen-reader navigation tools for visually impaired visitors.

We also reorganized the menu structures to prioritize paths to the most pertinent info. We switched to a “Mega Menu” style navigation and reduced the number of menu options to create clearer paths toward the information users need. 

For example, the previous menu provided users a link of each of HCC’s conservation properties, nested under a clickable link to a map of all those properties. To simplify the user path, we removed the individual links, pointing users to the map first. Then, we redesigned the map page, using the Google Maps API to provide a short description of each property right on the main map. If users want to read about each property in more detail, they can click through from the map for the full story.

Finally, in some areas of the site, we consolidated individual pages into one and used page anchor links to navigate users from the main menu to the specific section they needed on a page — like the “Volunteer” section on the “Events” page. 

Unifying the design across pages and devices

Once the structure of the new site was in place, we needed to extend new design choices across every page, make it all work on mobile, and make sure the HCC team could publish pages on their own.

To do that, we built a library of page, section and element templates that the HCC team can drag and drop into new pages. 

If the team needs to re-style fonts, colors, spacing or animations, we also built quick styles they can add to customize individual elements while keeping changes visually unified. And to help new employees understand how the system works, we provided an interactive styling cheatsheet, along with a guide to the Cornerstone templates we built. 

How'd we fit the budget?

Old membership page New membership page

Nonprofits have unique budget constraints, and we feel that adapting to those constraints is one more way — in addition to building great websites — that we can make a difference for great causes.

While a website redesign can be completed in less than six months, this project took almost exactly one year from our first call to our launch day. We took that time to carefully align priorities, take steps toward updates, and spread the project costs over a greater period of time. Stepping towards the goal in chunks allowed us to plan progress to fit the budget.

Whether your organization has a long legacy and needs a new front page, or if you’re just launching, we’d love to help build a clear, easy-to-navigate and maintainable website for you.

Need a refresh on your website?

Let’s talk about the goals and how to get there.

Everyone should have a website they’re proud to share.