Comanche Outdoors

Overview

Comanche Outdoors is a 501(c)(3) public charity in Spotsylvania, Virginia, that funds outdoor recreational therapy for active-duty military, veterans and first responders. Vahzor redesigned and rebuilt comancheoutdoors.org: every page and product from the old site kept, every word kept, and the whole thing reorganized around the six kinds of people who arrive and what each needs to do next.

The problem

The old site had grown page by page on a template: a grey navigation bar over the organization's own green and orange, pages that each had to be read to be understood, and the timely things — events, updates — living on social media because the site was hard to change. Six audiences arrived at one front door and had to work out for themselves where to go.

A redesign could not fix any of that by writing. The organization's words are its own and were to stay as they were, and the facts a charity site usually leans on — impact numbers, testimonials, a board — had not been published and could not be invented.

The solution

Route before narrate. The homepage opens on the tagline and then, immediately, on the six routes: participate, donate, sponsor, volunteer, attend, refer. Every page's first job is to make the next step obvious, and the money flows — donations, sponsorships, registrations, merchandise — never share a view.

A design drawn from the organization's own things. The palette is sampled from the logo files rather than estimated; the cavalry guidon — a cloth field, a staff edge, a swallowtail notch — is the one structural device, in buttons, event rows and tiers; the lettering matches the logo's condensed capitals. Nothing of the veterans-charity default: no flag at sunset, no navy and red.

Built for volunteers. Community updates come from a Google Sheet and appear within minutes; outing photos come from an approved collection; the two forms land in sheets and an inbox; donations run through PayPal. No admin system, no logins, no redeploys — and where the organization has not published a number, the page says so instead of filling the space.

Technical notes

• Next.js with the App Router and React, every content page prerendered; commerce pages are static too, with PayPal Checkout opening in a panel and orders recorded to a Google Sheet and an email.
• Two forms, built into the site, posted to server routes that validate and deliver each submission twice — a row in that form's Google Sheet through a bound Apps Script, and an email through Resend.
• Community updates are read from a published Google Sheet on a short cache; adding a post is pasting a link on the next row. Photos are built from an approved folder by a script that writes the gallery data and counts.
• WCAG 2.2 AA throughout: one heading per page, a skip link, 44px targets, programmatic labels with inline validation, reduced motion honoured, and crisis support with tap-to-call on every page.