Te Tautiaki Hoiho

Te Tautiaki Hoiho protect the hoiho — the world's most endangered penguin. Their WordPress site had accumulated years of technical debt: donations were unreliable, and every routine content change had to go through an external agency. For an NGO with limited resources, that dependence cost both money and voice.

Then the deadline moved. The trust learned they'd be featured on Seven Sharp, primetime national television. A six-week project had to compress — and design couldn't be the thing that held it up.

The old site was penguin blue-and-yellow — a brand built around one bird. I moved it toward greens, beiges and earth tones, which is what the trust actually does: habitat. The organisation is about the coastline the hoiho depend on, not just the mascot.

To hit the broadcast date, development started before design was finished. That only works if the design is systematic, so I worked in components from the start and made the palette shift something that could be applied consistently rather than page by page.

The part I care most about is invisible to visitors. I designed for the trust's own staff as a user group — component structures they could reorder, fill and publish themselves. When a new donation drive lands, they change it. Not an agency, not a developer.

The site was live when the segment aired. Accessibility moved from "needs work" to "good", alongside performance and SEO — a cleaner heading hierarchy and a more accessible markup structure throughout. And the trust's editors stopped waiting on anyone.

The rebuild was a team effort — CloudCannon's developers took the performance numbers from an eleven-second load to under two. What I own is the direction it took, and the fact that a small NGO can now run their own website.