Great work, slowed down by its own website.

The work was strong. The site was slow.

brandkind runs on a community: experienced brand and marketing professionals, matched with social enterprises and charities that couldn't otherwise afford them. The website has two jobs. Show social enterprises what that work looks like, and bring new professionals into the community.

• An Elementor site, carrying a page builder's weight of unused code on every page, with a loading screen in front of each one.
• Plugins doing structural work, each one another thing to update, secure and hope stays supported.
• Case studies that needed a consistent home for the deliverables, the mockups and the voices of the people involved.
• A business run on Airtable. Leads and onboarding live in Airtable forms that had to keep working.

The team is small and stretched. It needed something simple to run that still looked the part next to the organisations it works for.

Fast by default, editable by design.

The rebuild replaced Elementor with a custom theme: plain PHP, Tailwind and vanilla JavaScript, no page builder, and only the plugins that earn their place. Pages load without a spinner because there's nothing heavy to load.

What the page builder gave the team, the freedom to change things, came back through structured fields. Every section is editable from WordPress, and a section left empty simply doesn't appear. The team changes the content; the design holds.

The design was approved at the first review with only minor changes. Most of the old content was scraped across automatically, so the team's time went into improving the copy, not retyping it. Airtable stayed the engine: briefs go straight to the team's Airtable intake, while joining and general enquiries use native forms that match the site.

The rebuild

• A custom WordPress theme. Tailwind CSS, vanilla PHP and JavaScript, no page builder.
• A case study template built for proof. Client, sector, outcome and pathway up top; the brandkinder and the social enterprise side by side; deliverables and a mockup gallery. Empty sections disappear.
• A filterable portfolio of 18 projects, browsable by brandkind's four pathways and by sector.
• The community as a directory. Founders, advisors and core crew as profiles the team orders and hides themselves. Members' contact details never appear publicly.
• Three ways in from one contact page. Submit a brief through Airtable, join the community, or simply get in touch, with every native submission stored in WordPress as well as emailed.
• Spam handled quietly. A honeypot, rate limits, content scoring and a Cloudflare Turnstile check.
• Editable wherever the team asked. Hero images, pathway images and footer accreditation logos all moved into fields after the team's first round of feedback.
• Every old address redirected. 301s for the legacy Elementor URLs, and the old domains pointed at one canonical address.

The portfolio, front and centre, on a site that keeps up.

The new site went live at brandkindcommunity.com in mid-2026, with every old URL redirected. Eighteen projects sit in a portfolio a social enterprise can filter to find work like its own.

The team runs it day to day. New projects, community members and page copy go up from WordPress without a developer, and without breaking the design.