Breast Cancer Comfort Foundation

The Breast Cancer Comfort Foundation was a nonprofit that supported people going through breast cancer treatment with Comfort Baskets, Chemo Comfort Bags, emotional support & community. Founded on Long Island in 2015 by survivor & registered nurse Debi Cavolo, it helped more than 3,500 women across the country.

When I found it in 2019, its WordPress site didn’t reflect any of that. It had been built up over about five years, but most of the site was placeholder & unfinished, with:

• Empty pages & posts, including events, gallery & resources pages with no content
• Some pages that should have been posts & some posts that should have been pages
• Two different contact emails on two different pages
• Team members without last names or bios
• A wall of fame for donors of $500 or more that was promised but didn’t exist
• A “Boobtique” that said it was opening to the public, with no way to buy anything
• A blog with a single post

I was a few months into bootcamp when I found BCC on VolunteerMatch over Thanksgiving break in 2019. The foundation was looking for a web developer to help improve its site. I researched them, built a proof of concept over the weekend using their existing copy & images & sent Debi a link on Facebook Messenger. She replied about an hour later, saying she loved it & wanted to meet.

I offered the site for free, because I supported their mission & wanted to put the coding skills I’d been learning to use on a meaningful project. The next weekend, I met Debi & her sister Susan at their office & became their web developer.

Over the next six years, I built the site four times, each time for a different reason.

I developed five pages (Home, Boobtique, Donate, Volunteer & Team) in a black & pink color scheme, chosen to contrast with the old site, with a JavaScript hamburger menu for mobile.

As the foundation grew, its new COO asked me to rebuild the site in WordPress with the Divi builder, so people who didn’t code could update it. I built what they asked for, but everything I could do in minutes with CSS took hours in Divi. Mobile & desktop versions of each section had to be built separately & simple features like a homepage carousel needed workarounds. When the COO left, I inherited the build as technical debt.

After I graduated from bootcamp in 2021, I rebuilt the site in Next.js in a matter of days & moved it off WordPress. I backed up nearly 3,000 images & pointed the foundation’s domain at Netlify. The new site had a contact form on every page, a Google Map, a blog for news & updates & a supporters page with tiers. Visitors could donate from every page, sign up to volunteer, follow the foundation on social media & leave a Google review. A separate component mirrored posts from the foundation’s Facebook group onto the site. Then I built the shop.

After the foundation closed, I took down the shop & payment code & rebuilt the site on my own as a lightweight archive. The contact form now runs on Netlify Forms.

Before designing anything, I needed the content. I copied everything from the old site into Google Docs, researched the foundation through local news coverage & recovered text, photos & videos from its old site & blogs. Then I rewrote & organized it all.

That became new pages for the team & volunteers & a Sponsors page with supporter stories, including the $500+ supporters wall the old site had promised. It also became a memorial page for those lost to breast cancer & a “Share Your Story” page for survivor stories.

I also worked with volunteers who wrote for the foundation’s blog alongside staff. I edited their posts & published them on the site.

The foundation sold its comfort baskets & bags through Etsy, so supporters had to leave the site to send one. I wanted them to stay on the site, so I compared options like the Shopify Buy Button, Square & Stripe, along with a few self-hosted ones. Cart security was one of my biggest concerns.

I ended up building my own cart, with Stripe handling payments & EasyPost handling shipping. Netlify serverless functions took the place of a Node & Express back end, so a small nonprofit didn’t have to pay for a server running around the clock.

For security, the front end only sent item numbers & quantities to the back end. The back end looked up each item’s price, size & weight, then sent the prices to Stripe & the shipping details to EasyPost, so no one could change them from the browser.

The shop had 12 gifts across three types: Comfort Baskets, Chemo Comfort Bags & Chemo Comfort Bags with blankets. Each had its own page listing what was inside.

Once the new site & shop were live, orders started coming in from outside the tri-state area. The foundation’s Google Business Profile saw more activity & people used the contact form to ask about volunteering. Even now, with the foundation closed, its Google profile still gets 50 to 100 views a month.

Most of the feedback was about the baskets & bags themselves. Recipients sent photos of themselves with their gifts, unboxing videos & notes about how much the gifts meant to them. Many of those photos & videos ended up on the site.

“Working with Vish to build our website has been an absolute joy. He understood our mission at the Breast Cancer Comfort Foundation from the start and translated it into a site that is both beautiful and deeply personal. His professionalism, creativity, and attention to detail made the process effortless, and the end result truly reflects the heart of our organization. I can’t recommend him highly enough!”

Six years & four versions taught me to build what a client asks for, then help them get to what they need.