Overview

We can’t recommend working with Emily enough. Emily has helped us make a comprehensive and cohesive website to ensure our residents know how to find the resources they need. She’s helped empower our team with the tools to make updates when needed but is also so responsive and helpful in situations where we need her support. You should hire her!

Catherine Sharp – Chief of Staff, Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th Ward

In the Spring of 2022, the 40th Ward of Chicago reached out to me to redesign their WordPress website. In addition to the website being difficult for a small staff to maintain, it had become nearly unusable with an ad-hoc approach to adding pages to the main menu and multiple accessibility failures. The office relied heavily on social media to communicate with constituents because their website had become so difficult to manage. We worked with them to develop a more intuitive, maintainable website that could act as a single source of truth and provide the information needed by constituents.

Project Details

Project Overview

In 2026 we revisited this WordPress powered website, migrating from a custom classic/hybrid theme to a fully custom block-based theme.

The Greater Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce had a working website, built on a classic hybrid WordPress theme that had accumulated years of customization between 2012 and 2025: shortcodes, ACF fields, two global stylesheets totaling nearly 7,000 lines of CSS, and various custom PHP page templates.

Challenges

This “vintage” WordPress site had accumulated a lot of issues since it’s first build in 2012:

• Flat architecture: Since the web is all about relationships, we want to see a clear hierarchy of content – relationships between pages help give meaning and importance to content. Our 2019 update addressed this.
• Hard to use and remember menu structure: If a page was created, it got added to the menu – there wasn’t really a clear logic to either event.
• Lack of meaningful headings: Essentially, the lack of headings resulted in a lack of semantic page structure and (again) meaning.
• Poor URL structure: On-the-fly URLs created for those on-the-fly pages meant that we were missing out on useful, readable URLs that people could readily understand and trust.
• Inconsistent use of content types: Since this site was largely inherited, there was never a real technical hand-off or training time. Hence, a lot of the dynamic power of WordPress was underutilized.

What we did

I rebuilt the site from the ground up on a custom WordPress block theme, starting with the templates and working through every page of content.

All the content previously locked in shortcodes and ACF fields was manually recreated as page content using native WordPress blocks or built as custom ACF block — which means staff can now edit any page directly in the site editor without touching code or calling me (mostly).

I worked closely with the GRCC program manager to refine and develop content, create a stable site architecture that allowed their small team to scale, and work to highlight the unique aspects of the local business and creative community in Ravenswood, Chicago.

On the technical side, the theme went from 6,856 lines of CSS across two always-loading stylesheets to a single 220-line file, with block-specific styles that only load on pages where they’re actually used. Images were optimized and resized, render-blocking resources were eliminated, alt text was added throughout, and contrast failures were resolved.

I recorded training videos and walked the team through the editor so the knowledge stayed with them after launch.

What changed

The numbers tell a clear story on mobile:

The page went from showing visitors nothing for over 9 seconds to rendering content in under 2. Total blocking time dropped 84%, which directly affects how responsive the site feels on slower connections. The Core Web Vitals assessment passed — both before and after the migration, but the lab scores show how much headroom was gained.

The CSS reduction means faster maintenance, fewer conflicts when plugins update, and a much smaller surface area for things to go wrong.

Focusing on accessibility and training for editors

We had some common accessibility errors throughout the site like missing alt text, poor contrast, skipped headings, and redundant links. We worked to tighten up our color system to avoid contrast errors and I made accessibility a core part of meeting discussion and training.

Learn about the WebAIM Score and the WebAIM Million annual report.

What’s still in progress

Supplemental Projects

I’ve also worked with the GRCC to reimagine several of their logos, most recently to update the main organizational logo:

We chose to highlight the unique Deagan Building more realistically. Instead of a random clock “icon” – the clock tower time is 8:15PM – on the 24-hour clock this is 20:15. The chamber was founded in 2015. A tiny goose egg, but, why not?

Special event logos

The chamber hosts several signature events each year, notably: Ravenswood on Tap which features local breweries along Malt Row and the Annual Ravenswood ArtWalk, a tour of arts and industry highlighting the local artists, artisans, and local businesses who work in the Ravenswood Industrial Corridor.

Largest Contentful Paint improved from 14.4 s to 7.9 s but remains above Google’s 2.5 s target. The likely culprit is the hero image. A 90-day check-in is scheduled to review field data after Google re-crawls the site and the Core Web Vitals data refreshes.

Project Details