Custom Shopify theme with accessibility-first design for a Dallas nonprofit.
Dwell with Dignity needed a website that matched the quality of their mission: transforming living spaces for families in need. We redesigned their entire web presence on Shopify with WCAG compliance, SEO optimization, and a donor-friendly experience that drove a 500% increase in leads.
The short version.
Dwell with Dignity is a Dallas-based nonprofit that designs and furnishes homes for families transitioning out of homelessness. Their existing website was outdated, inaccessible, and failing to convert visitors into donors, volunteers, or referral partners.
We built a custom Shopify theme from scratch with WCAG AA compliance, structured data for SEO, optimized donation flows, and a content architecture that tells their story effectively. Within 3 months of launch, contact form submissions increased 500% and organic search traffic tripled.
A mission that deserved better than a template.
The organization’s website hadn’t been updated in years. It was built on a generic template that didn’t reflect the quality of their work or serve their audience effectively:
- Poor accessibility: no alt text, broken heading hierarchy, insufficient color contrast, no keyboard navigation
- Low conversion: donation and volunteer forms were buried, contact flows had 60% abandonment
- No SEO foundation: missing meta descriptions, no structured data, broken internal links
- Slow performance: 4+ second load times due to unoptimized images and bloated theme code
- Content management pain: staff couldn’t update pages without developer help
They needed a site that could serve donors, volunteers, corporate partners, and families in need, all with different goals and accessibility requirements.
Accessible, fast, and built for impact.
We designed and built a custom Shopify theme that prioritizes accessibility, performance, and conversion, while giving the team full content control:
- Custom Liquid theme: built from scratch, no template bloat. Modular sections for flexible page building without developer involvement
- WCAG AA compliance: semantic HTML, ARIA labels, keyboard navigation, skip links, proper heading hierarchy, and 4.5:1 contrast ratios throughout
- SEO architecture: structured data (JSON-LD) for nonprofit organization, events, and articles. XML sitemap, canonical URLs, and optimized meta across all pages
- Optimized donation flows: streamlined forms with fewer steps, prominent CTAs, and trust signals that reduced abandonment by 65%
- Performance optimization: lazy loading, responsive images with srcset, critical CSS inlining, and deferred JS loading for sub-1.5s page loads, all built to our engineering standards
- Content management: Shopify metafields and section schemas that let staff update hero images, testimonials, impact stats, and event listings independently
Shopify, optimized for nonprofit needs.
We leveraged Shopify’s platform strengths (hosting, CDN, SSL) while building custom functionality through Liquid templates and the Storefront API:
Accessible, fast, conversion-optimized
Every page section is built as an independent Shopify section with its own schema, allowing the team to reorder, show/hide, and customize content without touching code. The theme scores 95+ on Lighthouse across all four categories.
“Our new website finally reflects the quality of our mission. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in volunteer sign-ups and donor inquiries, and our team can actually update content without calling a developer. It’s exactly what we needed.”
Executive Director, Dwell with Dignity
Need a website that
drives real impact?
We’ll design an accessible, high-converting site that matches the quality of your mission.