Postpartum Health Alliance is a San Diego-based nonprofit that connects families, new parents, and perinatal mental health professionals with the support and resources they need. They came to Cornershop ready for a full website redesign, one built to serve two very different audiences well: the families searching for postpartum mental health support, and the volunteer staff and providers behind the scenes making that support possible.
A Website That Couldn’t Keep Up With a Growing Community
Postpartum Health Alliance’s old site was running on an outdated platform that was slowing the organization down in ways that mattered. The provider directory was clunky and hard to search; families in the middle of a hard moment had to work too hard just to find a therapist who took their insurance or specialized in their situation. Membership management was entirely manual, which meant hours of admin work for a staff made up entirely of volunteers. And every warmline contact form submission landed in one shared inbox, where it had to be forwarded by hand before a volunteer ever saw it. Postpartum Health Allilance needed a modern, easy-to-manage website that could match the responsiveness of its mission.
Designing Around Two Very Different Site Visitors
We kicked off in spring 2025 with a thorough discovery process, digging into how families navigating postpartum mental health challenges and the providers who support them actually use the site. That research shaped everything that followed. Our team delivered a refreshed logo, a brand-new WordPress site, a rebuilt provider directory, and a members-only portal, all designed to be easy for a lean, all-volunteer staff to manage. For membership, we built on Paid Memberships Pro, creating an application and approval workflow that mirrored the existing screening process.
A Faceted Provider Directory and a Membership System Volunteers Can Run
The new provider directory uses faceted search, so families can filter by therapeutic specialty, accepted insurance, and service location to find the right match fast, exactly the kind of self-serve search experience families expect from a nonprofit provider database. On the back end, we tackled one of the project’s most complex pieces: midway through development, the alliance moved away from PayPal and landed on Stripe as its payment processor. That shift meant reconfiguring the entire membership flow, rebuilding the payment setup in a Stripe sandbox, and testing every case, from subscription renewals to failed payments to member-facing email notifications, so the system would hold up once real members were using it. We worked closely with the alliance’s team throughout to make sure the final product was clear and easy for non-technical staff to run day to day.
Fixing the Warmline Bottleneck and Getting Ready for Launch
We also solved a long-standing pain point on the communications side. The new Contact Us page uses smart form routing, so warmline inquiries now land in both the general inbox and the warmline inbox at the same time, with no manual forwarding required. Rounding out the build, we handled technical SEO, mapped 301 redirects to protect the site’s existing search rankings, improved site performance, and closed the project with a full training session so the team could hit the ground running after launch.
A Site That Works as Hard as Volunteers Do
This project asked for real patience and flexibility from both teams, and that’s what made it work. Postpartum Health Alliance is run entirely by volunteers juggling full-time jobs and time zone differences, and the project’s scope evolved along the way, especially with the mid-project changes. We adapted as the project grew, kept communication clear and structured, and delivered a website built for how the alliance’s community actually uses it: a new parent searching for a postpartum therapist at midnight, and a volunteer reviewing a membership application on a lunch break.
See more of our Web Design and Membership Development work!
