Challenge
The Virginia Association for Biological Farming is a nonprofit, founded in 1979, that advances organic and regenerative farming through education, advocacy, and its annual conference. Its old site ran on a page-builder theme that was hard to maintain and hard to search.
An audit before the rebuild found no main heading on the homepage, no skip link or main landmark for screen reader users, and about 30 of 52 pages with titles that did not match their content. VABF also wanted its resource library and a directory of Virginia farm businesses to be easy for the public to use.
Approach
VABF chose this work through a competitive request for proposals, and the build was tied to a grant milestone. The site was rebuilt on a custom theme where staff assemble pages from ready-made sections, so they can update it without a developer.
The member system was carried over intact, so no member data had to move. And the proposed paid mapping plugin and Google Maps account were replaced with a self-hosted map, which took a license fee and a billing account off the organization’s budget.
Delivery
The Resource Hub holds 359 resources, filtered by topic and type and paged in place, and it still works when scripting is unavailable. The Virginia Farm Business Directory lets visitors filter farms by type, region, and products, with the results and map pins updating together. Farm owners can suggest changes to their own listings, which VABF staff approve before they go live.
The site also covers events with a public submission form, conference sessions and speakers, programs, and ways to get involved. Before handoff, an accessibility pass fixed color contrast, keyboard focus, heading structure, unnamed map pins, and pages that scrolled sideways on small phones. Staff were trained on the new site and received written documentation.
Outcome
The new site launched in October 2026. In automated testing with axe-core across every page, at desktop and phone widths, it went from color contrast failures on 24 pages to zero WCAG 2.2 AA violations, with no sideways scrolling at 320 pixels.
VABF staff now manage resources, farm listings, events, and pages themselves, and the organization pays nothing to run its farm map.