Website takeover · Brand rollout · Hosting migration
Taking ownership of a live nonprofit website, rolling out its new brand, and moving its hosting without changing a word of what donors read.
The engagement
Wheels from the Heart is a 501(c)(3) that has placed reliable vehicles with single mothers since 2011. Its website was live and working but had no source repository, ran an unused internal demo alongside the public pages, and did not yet reflect the organization's 2026 brand refresh. Euphemios took the site into version control, applied the brand system, added a partners page, and moved hosting to Vercel — with the public copy preserved exactly.
01
Everything had to change except what visitors actually read. With no handover repository, the deployed site itself was the only source of truth, so the first requirement was a provable baseline: a capture faithful enough that any later difference could be attributed to a deliberate decision rather than to drift. The move also had to carry the organization's Microsoft 365 email through a nameserver change without a minute of disruption.
02
We captured the live site byte for byte, committed it untouched as the repository's first commit, and made every subsequent change a reviewable diff on top of it. A gate re-renders each public page and compares it against that capture, so the promise of unchanged content is enforced by a machine rather than asserted. Removing the internal demo was decided by tracing which code the public pages could actually reach, and the stylesheet reduction that followed was proven safe by confirming every rendered frame stayed pixel-identical. The hosting move rebuilt the DNS zone in the studio's own account, replicating the full email record set before the nameservers were switched.
03
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05
The public copy visitors read is unchanged, and a per-page comparison against the original capture proves it on every build.
The organization's 2026 brand now appears across the whole site rather than only in its asset folder.
The internal demo pages are no longer reachable from the public site.
Donors reach the current payment link from every donation call to action, and the printed QR code scans.
Hosting moved off the previous provider with email untouched; the domain registration and mailboxes were deliberately left where they were.
The site went live on its own domain on August 5, 2026, with HTTPS and a CI gate behind every deployment.
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