Documented WordPress website development story

Back in 2020, when the world was upside down, I met Documented NY, a small nonprofit news outlet in New York telling the stories of immigrant communities, at the time only in English. Spanish, Kreyol, and Chinese would come later.

They were young, scrappy, and full of mission-driven energy. Their WordPress site was giving them more headaches than help.

They needed a migration, a cleanup, and a site that wouldn't break every time they tried to publish an article. More than anything, they needed someone to say: "Yes, it's doable."

That became the frame for everything we did together.

Early Days

First order of business: migrate to a new server, normalize templates, fix an avalanche of bugs. One issue after another, and every time, our approach was the same: fix it, but also understand it.

I didn't want to just patch problems. I wanted to understand why they existed, how they affected real people, and how we could build something that would hold. When you're helping a news outlet serving immigrant communities navigating real-world challenges, you don't do it halfway.

Every bug and roadblock was a reason to learn and improve.

The First Big Leap

After two years working through everything 2020 and 2021 threw at us, Documented decided it was time for a full transformation. New branding, new voice, fresh start.

The rebrand came from Peppeh Co.: clean, minimalistic, different. The old site stopped mattering the moment the new one was done.

We had less than two months to develop the entire new template. It was December. We shipped it.

Learning From the Numbers

A few months after launch, Documented started gaining real traction. They were publishing stories and guides that were actually changing lives, like this one.

April 2022 marked one of their first major traffic spikes. We went deep into the analytics to understand user behavior, not just to watch the numbers climb.

By the end of 2022, a few things were clear:

• Mobile-first isn't optional.
• Keeping readers moving through stories matters more than most people expect.
• Measure everything.

Scaling Up: 2023 and Beyond

If 2022 was about learning, 2023 was about building on what we'd learned.

As Documented's articles started going viral and their newsroom expanded, new needs came fast:

• A custom plugin to manage article positioning on the homepage and fix Co-authors edge cases.
• New templates for Guides and Resources to support recirculation.
• A custom pixel tracker (inspired by ProPublica's Pixel Ping) to track collaborations and republications.
• Google Ad Manager integration for a smarter ad setup.
• A full custom HTML newsletter template, built with Bluelena.

At one point we had three developers and a designer just to keep up.

Going Multilingual

In 2023, Documented made the move that would most redefine their reach: they went multilingual.

Not translations. Original reporting in Spanish, Kreyol, and Chinese, with dedicated journalists writing stories that spoke directly to their communities. It was necessary. And it was not easy.

Our technical roadmap had to support an entirely different kind of newsroom: new workflows, smarter CMS architecture, frontend UX that worked across four languages.

We built systems designed to last. Giving immigrant communities access to journalism in their own language isn't an add-on feature. It's the point.

Every late-night deployment during that period felt like contributing to something larger than the code.

Where Things Stand

Documented NY is stronger than it's ever been. They've had their best quarter on record, even as New York City and the U.S. face some of the deepest immigration crises in recent memory.

We're still partners. More work is coming.