A Unified Website for an Education Nonprofit Empowering New York City's Public Schools

A Discovery Process to Refocus the Story

We began with a comprehensive discovery process, interviewing stakeholders from across the organization and gathering outside perspective as well, to understand how New Visions had evolved and where the existing site was holding them back. The central insight was a matter of emphasis. New Visions had spent decades known for founding and supporting individual schools, but that was no longer the story the organization needed to tell. What mattered now was their role as a technology provider and partner to the schools, administrators, teachers, students, and families who rely on their tools every day.

That repositioning shaped everything that followed. We presented multiple sitemap directions and worked closely with New Visions to refine how they present and message themselves at a high level, dramatically simplifying a structure that had grown sprawling and hard to navigate. Rather than cataloging programs and past initiatives, the new architecture leads each visitor toward the offerings most relevant to them while reinforcing a single, unified message about who New Visions is and what they do for the school system.

Clear Pathways Through Toggle-Based Navigation

The most visible challenge was fragmentation. New Visions’ brand story, their Portal platform, and their professional learning services had all lived on separate subdomains that never quite connected. To solve this, we built a persistent toggle at the top of the site that lets visitors move instantly between the three destinations that matter most: the main brand site, the Portal, and Navigate, the organization’s paid professional learning and consulting arm. What had been a disjointed collection of properties now reads as one coherent ecosystem.

Beneath the toggle, we leaned into audience-focused navigation, structuring the site around what different visitors are trying to accomplish rather than around New Visions’ internal org chart. A principal evaluating the Portal, a teacher searching for biology curriculum, and a funder researching the organization’s impact each get a fast, obvious path to what they came for. This kind of audience-first approach is essential for an organization serving as many distinct stakeholder groups as New Visions, turning a complex set of offerings into something a first-time visitor can navigate with ease.

The Portal: Presenting a Platform Powering New York City’s Schools

The Portal is New Visions’ flagship product, a student planning and school management platform that leverages data to support the daily work of schools and their partners. It has become critical infrastructure across New York City, used to track attendance, monitor progress toward graduation, and coordinate support for students, and the organization is now exploring how to extend it to more districts beyond the city. A central goal of the project was to give this platform a home that matches its significance.

We built the Portal its own dedicated experience, reachable through the site’s toggle, that tells the product’s story and guides prospective partners toward a demo. The page leads with the scale of the platform’s reach, more than 800,000 students and 1,600 schools, and frames the Portal around the real problems it solves for educators rather than a checklist of features. Because trust is paramount when handling student data, we also gave prominence to New Visions’ security posture and their nonprofit commitment never to monetize student information, reinforcing the credibility that sets the Portal apart from typical vendors.

A Robust, Searchable Curriculum Library

Separate from their paid services, New Visions offers years of open-access curriculum, high-quality, standards-aligned materials in science and social studies that educators across the country use freely every day. This library is one of the organization’s most valuable assets, and much of it had become buried and difficult to navigate on the old site. Preserving it through the migration was non-negotiable, but simply carrying it over wasn’t enough.

Our goal was to bring the content across seamlessly while making it far more discoverable. We restructured how the curriculum is organized and gave it robust search and filtering, so a teacher can move from a full course down to a specific unit, resource, or instructional routine without digging. The result keeps the substance educators depend on while transforming a hard-to-navigate archive into a resource that genuinely invites use.

Built on WordPress, Focused for the Future

We built the site on WordPress with a block-focused architecture, giving the New Visions team full, code-free control to update content, publish news, and build new pages without breaking the established design. For an organization whose programs and technology are always evolving, that control matters, and it stands in sharp contrast to the previous site, which the team could not easily manage on their own. We also prioritized clean, direct pathways from the marketing site into New Visions’ tools, so the moment a visitor is ready to act, logging into the Portal or opening the curriculum is one click away.

The outcome is a fundamentally more focused digital presence. What had been a sprawling set of disconnected subdomains is now a single, coherent platform with a dramatically simplified sitemap, a clear story, and obvious paths to the tools people actually need. New Visions moved from a fragmented web presence that undersold them to a unified site that reflects the sophisticated technology partner they’ve become, and one they can confidently grow and manage themselves.

Related Nonprofit Website Designs

NMC has partnered with a range of mission-driven organizations that manage complex content and technology. You can see related nonprofit website design work in our case studies for the Aspen Global Change Institute, a research nonprofit whose site pulls thousands of records into a scalable content hub, and the Physician Assistant Education Association, a national education association we helped rebrand and rebuild.