All Nations Health Center · Website case study

A website for Missoula's urban Indian health center that reflects its community and loads fast on any phone

We redesigned and rebuilt allnations.health around the people it serves. The design comes from the center's own cultural references, registration is one clear path, and the site scores 100% on GTmetrix for performance.

The new allnations.health homepage, with the headline "We're here to support your physical, mental and spiritual wellness" over a photo of a dancer in regalia, and buttons to make an appointment or learn more about All Nations.

Key outcomes

100%: GTmetrix Performance and Structure scores for the homepage, after our optimization work
1: fillable registration packet in place of the old site's separate registration links, so new clients know what to bring to their first visit
14: step-by-step guides that let the center's staff manage events, staff and board pages, careers, and forms without a developer
10 weeks: from design approval to a live site

Project at a glance

Client: All Nations Health Center, an urban Indian health program in Missoula, Montana, offering medical, dental, behavioral health, and community prevention and health promotion services
Audiences: American Indian and Alaska Native people seeking care, the wider Missoula community, tribal leaders and policymakers, donors and grant funders, healthcare and community partners, and job seekers
Services: Website consulting and support, discovery, UX and information architecture, visual design, a component library and style guide, WordPress development, content migration, performance optimization, accessibility, SEO, staff training, and ongoing maintenance
Platform: WordPress with Elementor Pro, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, and The Events Calendar
Integrations: The center's appointment portal, Google Analytics 4, newsletter sign-up, site search, YouTube video, and fillable PDF forms
Timeline: Website support from June 2024, homepage concept from December 2024 to January 2025, design approval in January 2025, build in February and March 2025, and launch on April 10, 2025
Standards: Mobile-first and performance-first, with accessibility (color contrast, readable type, and consistent page structure) reviewed throughout
Engagement: Began as a website support engagement in 2024, grew into a full rebuild, and continues as an ongoing maintenance and support partnership. Supported by a Digital Mountaineers Bridge Grant, which covered part of the project's cost.

The challenge

All Nations Health Center is an urban Indian health program in Missoula, Montana. It provides culturally grounded medical, dental, behavioral health, and health promotion services to American Indian and Alaska Native people from many nations, and to the wider Missoula community.

For many of the center's clients, the website is the front door: it's where they find out whether they're eligible, how to register, where to go, and what's happening at the center. The previous site made that harder than it needed to be:

It didn't look like All Nations. The site's bright primary colors didn't reflect the brand the center wanted, and there was no brand guide or set of logo variations to build from.
Getting started took too many steps. Registration was spread across a row of separate buttons and forms, so new clients had to piece together what they needed.
Key information was hard to keep current. Events, staff and board pages, job openings, and locations all lived in places the team couldn't easily update.
The foundation had aged. The WordPress install ran on an outdated version of PHP that current plugins wouldn't support, and 91 user accounts had access to the site.
Phones come first. Many of the people the center serves browse on their phones, often in places with limited cell service. A slow, heavy site can mean someone doesn't get the information they came for.

There was a quieter risk, too. It's easy for a website about Native health to fall back on generic "Native American" imagery. All Nations wanted a site that reflected the communities it actually serves.

What success had to look like

The site communicates All Nations' story, mission, and vision, and reflects the center's own culture and values
New and returning clients can easily find services, eligibility, registration, and locations, especially on a phone
Pages load quickly, even on slow mobile connections
The center's staff can update events, people, jobs, and forms themselves
Funders, partners, tribal leaders, and job seekers each find what they need

Our approach

We started by helping the center with its existing site, which gave us a close look at what wasn't working before we proposed anything new. Each phase built on the center's review and approval of the one before it.

Phase 1
Assess and secure
In 2024, we helped the center's communications team stabilize the existing site, secure it, and plan what a new site would need.
Key deliverables
- A user audit that cut 91 accounts down to the handful of staff who needed access
- Hosting and domain details tracked down, and hosting moved into an account the center owns
- Prioritized fixes and updates to the existing site
- A requirements document covering priorities, audiences, technical needs, and compliance
Phase 2
Design
We designed a homepage concept, then held development until the design truly reflected the center, refining it with the center's team over several rounds.
Key deliverables
- A high-fidelity homepage design, revised with the center's team until they approved it
- A color system built from the center's logo and references, with deep reds in place of the original brown
- Floral patterns recreated from designs the center selected, and illustrated service icons
- A component library, color variables, and a simple style guide, since the center had no formal brand guide
Phase 3
Define
We mapped every page and gathered content in one shared document, so the center's team could add information and answer questions as departments sent it in.
Key deliverables
- A sitemap and navigation built around what clients need first, confirmed with the center's team
- A shared content document, with each page marked pending, in discussion, or complete
- Decisions on registration, appointments, events, announcements, and locations
- Researched tool recommendations, including nonprofit discounts on plugin licenses
Phase 4
Build and launch
We built the site on a staging server with the center reviewing as we went, tuned it for speed, and launched in April 2025.
Key deliverables
- 18 pages and templates, with custom post types for staff, board members, and careers
- An events calendar with event pages and photo galleries
- A fillable registration packet and dental health history form
- Performance work across images, fonts, scripts, and caching
- Link previews and SEO titles and descriptions for every page
- Cross-browser and mobile QA
Phase 5
Train and support
We trained the center's communications staff, handed over a full set of guides, a project summary, and backups, and stayed on as the center's web partner.
Key deliverables
- 14 step-by-step guides for staff
- A project summary with every page, plugin, and integration documented
- Monthly updates, backups, and maintenance, plus fixes and new features as needs change

What we built

Design rooted in the center's own culture

Every Indigenous nation has its own art, colors, and iconography. When the first homepage concept didn't yet feel like All Nations, the center was willing to move ahead and revisit the design later. We held development instead, because the look of the site would shape everything built on it.

The center's team sent us the references that mattered to them, including floral designs, regalia, and artwork of the center's own, and we refined the design with them round by round:

Colors from the center's world: the palette builds on the center's logo, with deep plum and sangria reds the team chose in place of a brown they didn't like
Patterns the center chose: floral designs, recreated by hand from the ones the team circled, and a patterned band above the footer
Illustrated services: a fish, an eagle, a bison, and a bear mark Primary Care, Health Promotion, Behavioral Health, and Insurance, building on motifs the center suggested
Calm enough for a clinic: we toned down busy dividers and loud imagery so the site welcomes visitors of every age who are looking for care

The center approved the final homepage the morning it arrived.

The Featured Services section of the new homepage, with illustrated animal icons for Primary Care, Health Promotion, Behavioral Health, and Insurance on a warm cream background.

A clear path to becoming a client

"Become a Client" sits in the header of every page. It leads to one page that explains eligibility, lists what to bring to a first visit, and offers a single fillable registration packet. The packet replaces the separate release, enrollment, and consent links on the old site.

"Make an Appointment" links straight to the center's appointment portal, and every location, with its map, phone, and fax numbers, lives on one Locations page.

The All Nations Eligibility for Services page, with an introduction to the center's services and a photo of a registration table at a community event.

The same eligibility page on a phone, with the heading, photo, and introduction stacked in one column.

Events, careers, and news the team runs itself

The center hosts everything from support groups to round dances and sweat lodge ceremonies. A searchable events calendar, with list, month, and day views, gives every event its own page. The homepage shows upcoming and past events and a gallery of event photos the team chooses.

Staff, board members, and job openings are each managed from simple forms in WordPress, so the team can keep the site current without editing page layouts. Careers became the second most visited page on the site in 2025.

The events calendar on allnations.health, with a search bar, list, month, and day views, and an upcoming Halloween Round Dance event.

Built to load where people are

Many of the center's clients reach the site on a phone, sometimes with a weak signal. We treated speed as a requirement, not a nice-to-have, and the homepage reached 100% on GTmetrix for both Performance and Structure:

Lighter pages: images resized and converted to WebP, and unused media removed
Faster first paint: the homepage banner preloads, fonts are served from the site itself instead of a third party, and the analytics tag loads without blocking the page
Fewer heavy scripts: a spam-protection script that slowed every page was removed from site-wide loading
Tuned caching that works with the host's built-in optimization instead of against it

Handed over, not handed off

We trained the center's communications staff on the new site as we built it. At launch, they received 14 step-by-step guides, covering everything from managing events and board meeting minutes to updating contact details, exporting form submissions, and setting social media previews. A project summary documents every page, plugin, and integration, so the center always knows what it has.

We stayed on afterward. When the Behavioral Health department moved, we updated the new address on every page and map across the site.

Before and after

The new All Nations Health Center homepage: the same wellness headline over a full-bleed photo of a person in regalia on a teal background, with buttons to make an appointment and learn more about All Nations. — Homepage. The old site paired bright primary colors with a faded hero and a single call to action. The new homepage leads with the center's own colors and imagery, a full-bleed photo, and clear paths to make an appointment, become a client, and find services.

Results

The new allnations.health went live on April 10, 2025, ten weeks after the center approved the homepage design. At the final handoff meeting, the center's team told us they were very happy with the site and the guides, and its communications staff were already using the guides to make updates on their own.

In 2025, about 9,200 people visited the site, most of them for the first time and most arriving from Google search. After the homepage, the most visited pages were Careers and Our Team.

Goals, what we delivered, and the evidence
Goal	What we delivered	Evidence
Reflects the center's culture and values	A design system built from the center's logo, colors, and the patterns its team selected, refined over several rounds of review	The center approved the final homepage the morning it arrived, and expanded the engagement from a homepage concept to a full rebuild.
Clients can find services, registration, and locations	"Become a Client" and "Make an Appointment" in the header of every page, one registration packet, and one Locations page	One fillable registration packet replaced the old site's separate registration links.
Fast, even on slow mobile connections	Image, font, script, and caching optimization	100% Performance and 100% Structure on GTmetrix.
Staff can update the site themselves	Custom post types for staff, board members, and careers, an events calendar, and 14 how-to guides	The center's communications staff began making updates with the guides at handoff.
Reaches the people the center serves	SEO titles, descriptions, and link previews on every page, with Google Analytics 4 carried over to the new site	About 9,200 visitors in 2025, mostly new and mostly from Google search, with Careers the second most visited page.

Sources: GTmetrix report for allnations.health, October 2025; Google Analytics 4, calendar year 2025, from Digital Mountaineers' 2025 annual report for All Nations Health Center (January 2026); the project summary delivered to the center, April 2025; project records, June 2024 to July 2025. Before screenshot of the previous allnations.health homepage from the Internet Archive, December 2024.

An ongoing partnership

We continue to support All Nations Health Center through a maintenance partnership: monthly WordPress and plugin updates and backups, content and form updates, troubleshooting, and help whenever the center's services or locations change.

Is this project like yours?

This case study is most relevant if your organization:

Is a tribe, tribal health program, urban Indian organization, or Native-led nonprofit
Wants a website that reflects its own nation or community, not generic imagery
Serves people who rely on their phones, including in places with limited cell service
Doesn't have a brand guide yet and needs a visual system it can keep using
Has a small team that needs to update events, staff, careers, and forms without a developer
Has a mission that's bigger than its budget

Capabilities demonstrated

Website consulting and support
UX research and information architecture
Culturally grounded visual design
Component libraries and style guides
WordPress development
Content migration
Performance optimization
Accessibility
SEO and link previews
Staff training and guides
Ongoing support

Planning a redesign or issuing an RFP?

We'd welcome the chance to bid. Tell us about your timeline and requirements, and we'll share relevant work, references, and an approach tailored to your organization.

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