In 2022, a small nonprofit accreditor reached out because it was about to lose the only person who kept its website running. What follows is how I rebuilt the PCSAS site, and why the more useful part of the story is everything I have done to keep it running in the years since.
How it started
In the fall of 2022, Joe Steinmetz reached out through the contact form on my site. He was the executive director of PCSAS, the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System, a small nonprofit that accredits Ph.D. programs in clinical psychology. At the time it was based here in Bloomington.
Joe was upfront about two things. First, he was the only employee. Second, in his words, he knew “virtually nothing” about the website beyond occasional light edits. The site and email had been handled as a favor by the IT person at a larger organization, and that arrangement was ending. So the real problem was not just a dated website. It was that PCSAS was about to lose the only person who knew how any of it worked.
The situation
The existing site ran on a Microsoft IIS server, with the domain registered at Network Solutions. There was even a small error where the non-www version of the address would not load, a side effect of how that server was set up.
Under the hood there was more going on than a normal brochure site. PCSAS runs a review process, and member programs log into a section of the site to upload documents for a review committee. That login area was built with custom PHP. It worked, but it was not something Joe could maintain on his own.
What we did
I want to describe the approach rather than make promises about outcomes, because every site and every organization is different. Here is the work at a glance, with a little more below.
Migration and hosting
I moved the domain and site onto WordPress with an SSL certificate on hosting I manage, then kept the DNS correct through a later server change. Moving hosting is where the quiet problems show up, so a lot of the early work was troubleshooting after the move.
Redesign and content
Joe wanted the site to be clearer about what PCSAS does and more useful to students. We reworked the content into shorter pages and organized posts by topic so people could find things.
That included resources on diversity, equity, and inclusion in training, which Joe felt the previous site did not convey well, and pages where headshots and bios expand when you click a name.
The review login area
Member programs log in here to upload documents for a review committee. Over the years I adjusted upload limits, fixed account creation issues, and sorted out logins after server changes.
On the login area I worked early on with the previous IT contact, Asa Boy, on a couple of the deeper PHP fixes. I would rather credit the help than imply I did all of it alone.
Two things that came later
The newsletter archive. PCSAS has a student-run newsletter that had been living in MailChimp. When MailChimp changed how it hosted past editions, those archives became hard to reach. Working with a graduate student on their team, I rebuilt more than a hundred newsletter articles as posts on the site, with proper images and alt text. Once that was done, they were able to cancel their MailChimp and Canva subscriptions.
SEO housekeeping. After launch I fixed some indexing and sitemap issues in Google Search Console and resubmitted the pages for crawling.
What happened
A note on results, with the usual caveat that search traffic depends on many things outside any one person’s control. After the indexing fixes, Google Search Console recorded steady growth. In January 2024 the site reached 250 clicks over a 28 day window. By September 2025 that figure was 700 over the same kind of window. Those are the numbers Google reported, not projections.
In Joe’s words
Joe left a public review shortly after launch. He wrote that he had worked with me on “an extensive total redesign and hosting” of the organization’s website, that I was “very helpful, extremely knowledgeable, and always prompt,” and that his organization was “very satisfied with the newly designed website.”
Joseph Steinmetz, then Executive Director, PCSAS. Public Google review, 2023.
Where things stand
This was never a one and done project. It started in 2022 and has continued through today, including a recent leadership transition. PCSAS has a new executive director, Laura Namy, and part of my job was setting up her access and making sure nothing broke in the handoff.
That, to me, is the real point of the story. The value was not only the redesign. It was being the person who is still here years later when the server changes, a login stops working, or a new director needs to be brought up to speed.
If you are in a similar spot
If your organization is about to lose the person who quietly kept your website running, or you need a WordPress site that someone will actually maintain over the long haul, that is the kind of work I do.