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IZE: A Partnership Sparked at the Dog Park 🐶

You know, some of the best collaborations start in the most everyday places. I met Nette—an amazing zoo educator and a the Administrator for the International Zoo Educators association (IZE)—right at our local dog park! We bonded over our pups, and soon we were talking about IZE’s incredible global mission and how their current website just wasn’t keeping up. It felt dated, wasn’t accessible to everyone, and was frustratingly slow on mobile.

Working closely with Nette, who was an absolute champion for this project, was a fantastic experience. My goal was to give IZE a straightforward, powerful new online presence that their whole team could easily manage.

We moved them to Pressable (my true partners in hosting, run by genuinely good humans, and yes, this switch also saved IZE nearly $1,000 a year!). We then rebuilt their site using clean, core WordPress—moving them away from their old page builder—to make it lean, fast, and future-proof.

The results of our teamwork were awesome:

• Their site went from a risky accessibility score of 66/100 to a functionally perfect 100/100 (WCAG 2.2 AA), making it welcoming for all users.
• Mobile performance skyrocketed from a PageSpeed score of 54 to an amazing 95 out of 100!

There’s so much more to this transformation—like how we dramatically cut the site’s carbon footprint, saw their visitor numbers soar after streamlining over 200 pages of content (which I rewrote from the ground up!), and put tools like Jetpack to powerful use. I’ve laid out all the details and the full journey in a blog post.

Read the IZE Project blog post here →

What truly makes me happy is seeing the IZE team, with Nette leading the way, now confidently running their own site, adding content, and owning their digital independence. That’s what this is all about.

“Collaborating with Nette and the entire IZE team to bring their vision to life on a platform they can now truly call their own was an incredible experience. Helping good people do good work – that’s the best part. 🌟”