Elizabeth Fry Society Of Ottawa
Two bilingual WordPress websites built over seven years and a working relationship grounded in patience, guidance, and genuine care for the work that the society does in our community.
CLIENT
Elizabeth Fry Society of Ottawa
SECTOR
Non-Profit
RELATIONSHIP
2018 - present
SERVICES DELIVERED
Website Design · Bilingual WordPress Development · Website Maintenance · Training and Coaching
A trusted partner for an organization that changes lives.
The Elizabeth Fry Society of Ottawa is a non-profit organization working with women and girls who have been, or may become, criminalized. Based in Ottawa, they deliver a wide range of programs such as residential housing, court and institutional services, counselling, and case management, serving some of society’s most vulnerable people.
Their focus is on the people they serve. Technology and web communications are not, and shouldn't have to be, their area of expertise. That's where Jester came in.
A complex audience. Two languages. A team with more important things to worry about.
EFry needed a website that could speak clearly to multiple audiences, including women seeking help, funders, government partners, lawyers, and the broader community, and be available in both English and French. The site needed to make their programs easy to find, their intake process accessible, and their organization's values immediately apparent.
Like many non-profits, they didn't have in-house web expertise, and they needed to be able to manage the site themselves after launch. That meant the solution had to be genuinely intuitive, and the team had to feel confident using it before we walked out the door.
Seven years. Two websites. Meaningful conversations.
Jester has built two complete bilingual WordPress websites for E Fry Ottawa, the first in 2018 and a full rebuild in 2020–2021. Both projects involved much more than website design and development.
2018 Website One — Building the foundation
Jester redesigned and rebuilt the eFry website from the ground up. We restructured their navigation and content architecture to reflect how clients and community partners actually look for information by organizing programs clearly, introducing a dedicated intake section, and ensuring every corner of the site was available in both official languages. We coached the eFry Ottawa team through every decision, translating their needs into a site that worked for the people they serve.
2020 Website Two — A return engagement
When it came time to rebuild again, eFry Ottawa came back to Jester. The second project ran from November 2020 through March 2021, delivering a fully refreshed bilingual WordPress site to reflect their evolving programs, team, and organizational identity. The trust built over the first project meant we could move quickly and collaboratively and quickly and efficiently get to a great, refreshed result.
Throughout Training, guidance, and ongoing support
After each launch, Jester provided hands-on training so the team could confidently update content, post job openings, publish annual reports, and keep program information current, without needing to call us for every small change. Because website design isn't their world, we made it ours to explain everything clearly along the way. No jargon. No assumptions. Just a genuine investment in their success.
Key deliverables across both projects:
WordPress website design and development (×2)
Information architecture and content structure
Bilingual content implementation (English & French)
Intake booking and program pages
Staff directory and publications sections
Funder recognition integration
Post-launch training and CMS coaching
Ongoing guidance and support
A site they own. A team that's confident. A relationship that kept going.
The Elizabeth Fry Society of Ottawa now has a clean, accessible, fully bilingual WordPress site they can manage themselves. It’s a site that reflects the seriousness and warmth of the work they do every day. Their team knows how to use it, and they haven't had to rely on a developer for the routine updates that keep a site alive.
The clearest signal of success: when it came time to rebuild in 2020, they came back to us. And the partnership continues today.
"Seven years. Two websites. One trusted partner."
✦ HOW WE’D APPROACH THIS WITH AN AI LENS
The core of this engagement is about listening carefully, building something clear, and making sure a non-technical team can own it. That hasn't changed, and it won’t in the future. But AI would sharpen several parts of the process.
AI-Accelerated Content Development. Bilingual content is one of the most time-intensive parts of a project like this. Today, we'd use AI to accelerate the drafting and translation workflow by producing French and English versions in parallel, then refining with the client rather than building from scratch. That frees up time for the strategic decisions that actually require human judgment.
AI-Powered Discovery. Understanding how clients in crisis navigate information, what language resonates, and what friction points exist is hard to get right through interviews alone. AI-assisted discovery tools would let us analyze how comparable organizations present similar services, surface patterns in how people search for support, and test content clarity before a single page is built.
Process Assessment & Implementation. The training and handoff phase is where many web projects fall apart. Today, we'd build AI-assisted content maintenance guides tailored to eFry Ottawa's specific site structure, making it even easier for their team to keep things updated independently long after the launch.
Ready to work together?
Let's talk about what you want to build.