Case Study · Creatnet Education
Five program verticals. One site that holds them all together.
Creatnet Education works on system-level transformation and community-led learning. Their site brings five-plus program verticals into one structure, with role-specific paths for donors, educators, volunteers, and policymakers. Four audiences, one site, and no internal team to watch it.
9hrs/mo
Saved per month. Consistently.
99.97%
Uptime over 5 months
0
Emergency calls since launch
Objectives
Four audiences, four paths, all of them open.
Creativity is needed for every role-specific path to keep working: a donor arriving at a program narrative, an educator looking for detail, a volunteer filling in an inquiry form, and a policy maker checking credibility. Each path was designed deliberately, and each is used once by someone who will not report a problem if they hit one. The brief was to make sure none of the four ever fails quietly.
Before NoDrama
A team whose job is impact, not infrastructure.
Creatnet's site was redesigned by Pangolin around a single idea: change starts small and multiplies outward. The information architecture, the role-based CTAs, and the cross-programme discovery were all built to carry that. It is a considered site, and considered sites have more moving parts.
NoDrama took over maintenance from day one. Not because anything was broken, but because a small program team should not be the thing standing between a donor and a working page.
The site was built to guide four very different people to four different places. NoDrama makes sure it keeps doing that.
The honest audit
What we found when we looked.
No staging environment.
Every update goes straight to live, on a site where five program verticals share reusable components. One component regression affects every program page at once.
Backup on default hosting plan.
Monthly snapshot, no off-site copy, never tested. A restore test was needed before anyone could trust it.
Five plugins are still in the launch-phase configuration.
Default settings, no login protection, and standard file permissions across all five. Two were also due for major version updates.
Volunteer and partner enquiry forms not verified post-launch.
Submissions were being recorded in the CMS, but the notification routing had not been confirmed. Enquiries were arriving somewhere nobody was checking daily.
Page speed baseline not established.
The program's narrative pages carry real imagery and hand-drawn assets. Load time had not been measured post-launch, and no CDN routing was in place.
The work
What we actually did. Specifically.
Onboarding audit and plain English brief.
Full site health check across plugins, themes, core version, backup status, security config, and performance. Sent Creatnet a plain-English summary of five items, in order of priority, no alarm.
Update checks and backup overhaul.
Set up before-and-after checks on key pages. Switched to 12-hour off-site backups with 90-day retention. Ran a restore test on day 11. It worked.
Hardening, plugin review, and form fix.
Updated and hardened all five flagged plugins. Applied login protection and file permission review. Corrected the enquiry form notification routing, so volunteer and partner enquiries now land in an inbox someone reads.
Performance and CDN setup.
Established performance baseline. Routed program page imagery through CDN with compression and lazy loading. Load time on program pages dropped from 3.9s to 1.9s.
Weekly update cycle and monthly path tests.
Every update, plugin, theme, and core runs with 22 key pages photographed before and after, including one template per program vertical. All four role paths were manually tested monthly. Report on the 1st.
The results
5 months in.
9hrs/mo
saved per month.
Hours the Creatnet team spends on programmes, partners, and funder relationships, not on-site administration.
99.97%
Uptime over 5 months.
Donor and partner pages are always available.
0
Emergency calls since launch.
Zero is the goal. That is the whole goal.
41
Updates applied. Zero breakages.
All checked before and after.
Business outcome
What the reliability actually bought them.
Site maintenance came off a small team's plate entirely, which at this size is the difference between program time and admin time. The notification fix means volunteer and partner enquiries have been reaching a person since week two rather than sitting in a CMS, and all five programme verticals have stayed fast and intact through every update since.
NoDrama Plan
The Higher Standard
$249/mo · cancel anytime · setup free on yearly plan
Start with The Higher Standard- Backups every 12 hours, kept 90 days
- Key pages photographed before and after every update
- Global CDN, caching and image optimization
- Two small jobs at once
- 2-hour response if down or hacked
- Real restore tested twice a year