WebCitz started working with this client in 2023
- Client: Gifted Meals (website offline)
- Platform: WordPress
- Industry: Food & Beverage
- Services: Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, Maintenance / Support, Web Hosting
The Challenge
Gifted Meals aimed to be a bridge between donors and families in need of food assistance. However, the site they handed to us was technically unstable and logically incomplete. The hurdles were significant:
- “Rescue” Development: We inherited a codebase that was riddled with errors and lacked a cohesive architecture.
- Complex Logistics Logic: Unlike a simple donation site, this required a specialized workflow where “Campaigns” (meals) could be created, funded, and fulfilled.
- Advanced User Roles: The site needed a robust registration process for donors, recipients, and potentially volunteers or partner organizations.
- Integration Hurdles: Bridging the gap between standard WordPress and the IgnitionDeck crowdfunding framework required over 200 hours of custom “Time and Materials” labor.
The WebCitz Solution
Despite numerous challenges, we delivered a sophisticated technical platform:
- IgnitionDeck Integration: We used the IgnitionDeck framework as the “engine” for the meal donation tool. We customized the crowdfunding modules with the help of IgnitionDeck to allow for real-time tracking of funded meals and transparent progress bars for specific donation goals.
- Custom Meal Donation Tool: We engineered a custom interface for the donation process, ensuring that the “checkout” was streamlined for donors while accurately recording the specific meal or family the funds were intended for.
- Enhanced Registration Workflow: We built out a multi-step registration process. This was designed to gather the necessary data for those requesting assistance while maintaining a professional and secure portal for donors to manage their history.
- Technical “Cleaning”: We spent dozens of hours undoing the poor work of the previous developer, stabilizing the database, and optimizing the site’s performance so that it could handle concurrent traffic and complex donation transactions.
- Knowledge Transfer: We attempted to provide guidance on how the system functioned, acting as lead engineers even as a new in-house contact was brought in toward the end of the project.
The Result
The project resulted in a powerful, custom-built donation platform with over 200 hours of senior-level development behind it.
