Saint-Gaudens Memorial

Saint-Gaudens Memorial, the century-old nonprofit behind the country's only National Park Service site devoted to an American artist, hired me as their WordPress engineer to move saint-gaudens.org off failing shared hosting, put it behind a real security edge, make the site measurable for a grant report, and hand the whole thing back to a two-person staff who could run it without me.

Key Takeaways

  • Rebuilt hosting, DNS and the security edge in one day: managed WordPress hosting, Cloudflare with rate limiting, a synced local environment and a deploy script, all live the day of kickoff.
  • Put protection where none existed, with Cloudflare mitigating 44,207 threats in a single month once the site had an edge in front of it, and secured the nonprofit rate for the organization.
  • Made a print campaign measurable, with a QR router mapping printed codes to tracked destinations the staff can repoint from the CMS.
  • Kept the Google Ad Grants account alive and working: conversions recorded, the account restructured, and up to $10,000 a month of in-kind spend activated.
  • Converted the hardest-to-maintain pages into structured CMS fields, seeded with their existing content, so seasonal updates became a staff task instead of a developer engagement.
  • Handed over a documented, self-service operation, with plain-language instructions for every routine task the staff performs.

Organization

Saint-Gaudens Memorial is a 501(c)(3) incorporated in New Hampshire more than a century ago to preserve the home, studios and work of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens at Aspet in Cornish. The Memorial later donated the property to the federal government, and today it funds and sponsors the concerts, exhibitions, fellowships and workshops held at Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park.

Challenge

The engagement ran against a hard end date, for an organization with no web team: the person updating the site day to day is the Executive Director, between board meetings and grant reporting. Everything built had to be justifiable in a grant report and operable by a two-person staff afterward.

Solution

  • Infrastructure first: hosting, DNS, WAF, rate limiting, a local environment and a deploy path, delivered in a single day.
  • A QR redirect router with CMS-managed destinations and campaign-tagged analytics for the print program.
  • Google Ads restructured for the Ad Grants rules, with conversion tracking moved to a direct, dependable implementation.
  • SEO foundations repaired at the theme level so the SEO plugin's output actually reached the page, plus custom per-season metadata for the concert series.
  • The concerts and season pages rebuilt as tabbed CMS fields, seeded from existing content so nothing visibly changed on launch day.
  • A blog migration onto native posts with a curated fallback image system, a matching press section, and a written handover guide covering every routine task.

Results

  • 44,207 threats mitigated in a single month behind the new edge.
  • Up to $10,000 a month of in-kind Ad Grants spend activated and kept qualifying.
  • Print campaign attribution from zero to measured.
  • 10 to 20 staff hours a season returned; $1,500 to $3,000 a season in developer spend avoided.
  • Hosting cost reduced by $200 to $500 a year.