Willamette Week’s Give!Guide
Willamette Week’s yearly giving platform, where donors back hand-picked local nonprofits. I led the rebuild of giveguide.org — the servers, the code and the way people give.
The situation
A giving campaign gets its traffic all at once, and the old site went down at peak — right when donors showed up. And it was tedious to maintain.
What I did
Working with Grady Britton, I was the technical lead, full-stack developer and DevOps on the rebuild — from the servers it ran on to the page where a donor hit give.
The work
Servers built for the rush
The new site ran on Linode, spread across several VPSs, each one set up for its own job. Peak traffic stopped being the moment it fell over and became the moment it was built for.
The processor they already had
A custom WordPress theme, integrated with PayFlow, the payment processor Give!Guide already used. The money moved the way it always had; everything around it was new.
No cart, no account
A shopping cart is the wrong shape for giving. Donors find the nonprofits they care about, pick as many as they like and give to all of them in a single pass, without signing up for anything.
Where it landed
Downtime stopped being an issue and donors gave to every nonprofit they picked in a single pass, no account required.
Does your site fall over when it matters most?
Campaign sites live or die on their busiest day. Tell me when yours gets busy and what breaks.