Geneva Academic Foundation

I love cleaning code! I enjoy the challenge of taking a good design that’s built on a bad theme and pulling it into a solid, future proof foundation…and I find it rewarding to help deserving Not for Profit organizations that make our communities stronger.

The Geneva Academic Foundation came to me when they needed help. The agency that had developed their website sent them a letter announcing that their annual support and host bill would be increasing to $2,000! Needless to say, they were shocked because the “support” they had received from their old agency was spotty at best.

So they decided to switch to sitebyMIKE for their hosting and support…

While migrating their site to a new server, multiple concerns came to light. Their site was built on a custom theme that hadn’t been updated in over eight years. This caused software conflicts when trying to upgrade plugins or the WP core on the site. The installed version of GravityForms was over six years old because the site would become unstable if GravityForms was updated. (Worse still, the site wasn’t that old, so the theme was bad before the site had even been built.) Sadly their prior developer’s version of “support” was leaving old software on the site, which is shameful. This opened them up to loads of spam coming into their contact forms.

But they liked the design…

So sitebyMIKE quickly rebuilt the site and matched the old design using GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks. It’s nearly indistinguishable from the original site, but significantly faster and now 100% up to date including enhanced spam filtering too.