Project Highlight: Recovery Cafe Network

We’re excited to share the story of one of our recent web design projects, featuring Recovery Café. For the past few months, we’ve worked with this amazing community and developed a new website solution that works for their unique needs.

Recovery Café Network (RCN) is a Washington-based community, meeting place, and resource for those traumatized by homelessness, addiction, and other mental health challenges.

The program started with one Recovery Café 10 years ago. Today, it’s evolved into a network of 11 communities with their own cafés. RCN needed a main website to act as the hub for their organization, along with easy website templates for each community to create their own site within the overarching network.

After walking through the web development process with RCN and brainstorming their needs, we created an elegant solution using the Pantheon system. Wondering what the Pantheon system is? It essentially means any time we update their theme for the main parent website, it will automatically update all the individual community sites as well. Whether it’s a plugin or a larger update, this makes it easy to maintain the theme for years to come.

This is possible through the use of a parent theme with child themes attached to it. Our design is based on a parent theme to provide the bones of the website, and then each child theme can be customized from there for each individual community. This makes it possible to have unique features and individual site owners for each cafe community, without affecting the original parent theme design or other child themes based off of it. The parent theme needs to be preserved in order to easily add on new websites whenever RCN adds a new cafe community to the network.

One of the crucial components of this project was creating a website that was easy to use and easy to update. The Pantheon system makes it simple for each community in the Recovery Cafe Network to create their own site and customize it to their needs while staying consistent underneath the RCN umbrella and easily maintaining the site with updates to the parent theme.

When RCN approached us to create a website for their network, we knew it was a great opportunity to help an amazing community. The RCN team is excited with the result and looking forward to rolling out their new design.

“It was a pleasure to work with IvyCat on a project that meant so much to RCN and our Emerging and Full Members. Their team took a complicated project and made it seem effortless throughout each stage.” —RCN team.

Are you looking for a unique web solution for your growing community? Get in touch and let’s talk about it.