Thirty years of care the old site never showed
AGAPE has cared for Bakersfield families since 1995 — a locally owned, family-run agency competing against national franchises with far bigger budgets. Choosing in-home care is an emotional, high-stakes decision, and the old site felt dated and clinical, wasn’t built for how families search today, and gave the office no way to hire or take intake online. We rebuilt the entire presence — design, content, brand and the back-office tools — into one cohesive, trustworthy experience.
From 2010s template to a site that feels like the service
We leaned into what a franchise can’t fake: warmth and local roots. A green color-block system built from AGAPE’s own logo color, candid real-home photography, and plain-spoken copy written for worried adult children — not for a brochure. Trust signals sit right in the hero: the license number, insured & bonded, thirty years, and the family rating.
A homepage that feels like a warm welcome
An auto-rotating hero — slow crossfade, gentle zoom, an animated rotating word — over candid in-home imagery, with the answer to a family’s first unspoken question right up front: licensed, insured & bonded, caring for this town since 1995.
Organized around the family’s question
The services architecture answers “what do we actually need?” instead of listing internal jargon: Homemaker, Personal Care, Companion & Respite, plus specialty support for Alzheimer’s & dementia, Parkinson’s, post-hospital recovery and 24-hour care.
A dedicated section positions AGAPE alongside home health and hospice teams — complementary and always non-medical, filling the hours between medical visits with dependable everyday support.
Eight communities, eight pages
Bakersfield, Delano, Tehachapi, Shafter, Wasco, Taft, Arvin and Lamont each get a landing page that speaks to that town — so a family searching from Delano finds a page about care in Delano, not a generic brochure.
Underneath: LocalBusiness and FAQPage structured data, a sitemap, llms.txt for AI answer engines, and a Learning Center of eight original articles written for the questions families actually type — choosing a caregiver, paying for care, the signs it’s time for help at home.
Built for the 10pm search from the couch
Most of this audience arrives on a phone, often late, often worried. The mobile build is a first-class design — slide-in navigation, tap-to-call everywhere, the free-assessment ask one thumb away — not a squeezed-down desktop.
Accessibility ran through the whole build: semantic HTML, ARIA, keyboard navigation, and color contrast checked against the green system.
An admin portal the office actually runs
The old presence gave the office no way to hire or take intake online. The new one ships with a private, self-contained admin portal — secure sessions with CSRF protection — where staff post and manage job openings, review the applications that come in through the site’s online application flow, capture leads, and see first-party analytics on page views and lead clicks. No developer required for any of it. Referral intake connects to the office’s ClearCare workflow, and transactional email runs on a modern API with a graceful fallback so a form submission never silently disappears.
Jobs & applications
The office posts an opening and it appears on the public Careers page with an online application flow; submissions land in the portal, not a shared inbox.
Leads, captured and counted
Contact and referral forms feed a lead list with first-party analytics — the office sees which pages people read and which buttons made the phone ring.
Hand-written, zero dependencies
Hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript; PHP with a clean includes architecture and SQLite underneath. No framework, no page builder, nothing to break in eighteen months.
The same warmth in print and in a text message
The rebuild went past the website: a cleaned-up logo with transparent and reverse versions, a full favicon and app-icon set, and a polished link-preview card — so the site looks like a brand when a daughter texts it to her brother.
In print: a modern brochure, and double-sided Google-review drop cards with a QR code for the moment a family wants to say thank you.
- Logo cleanup + reverse
- Favicon & app icons
- Print brochure
- QR review cards
- Social link-preview card
The design system
A green color-block system built from AGAPE’s own logo color, with gold accent rules and cream between the blocks. Manrope throughout — warm, modern, legible at every size. Rounded cards, soft shadows, and the dove-and-leaf mark carried from logo to favicon to print.
Warmth a franchise can’t fake
Thirty years of doing right by Bakersfield families is a story national franchises cannot tell — the old website just never told it. The new presence shows the service the way it actually feels, answers the questions families actually search, and gives a family-run office big-company tools it runs itself. If your business deserves to be shown the way it really feels, tell us about it.
- Hand-coded business sites
- Brand & print systems
- Admin portals & intake tools
- Local SEO & structured data
- Built in Bakersfield