West Kootenay Local Immigration Partnership
The challenge
The West Kootenay Local Immigration Partnership (WKLIP) is a coalition of organizations working together to create more welcoming communities for newcomers across Nelson, Castlegar, Trail, and the surrounding area.
As a newly established nonprofit, WKLIP needed more than a website. It needed a clear digital presence that could explain who the organization was, communicate its role within the local community, and make its resources and programs easier to discover.
The challenge was to create an experience that felt welcoming and approachable to newcomers while still communicating the credibility needed to work with community organizations, service providers, and other stakeholders.
Research
Understanding the landscape
There were more than 200 Local Immigration Partnerships (LIPs) across Canada, giving us a broad set of existing organizations to learn from.
WKLIP provided three websites they admired as initial references. We expanded that starting point by reviewing 10+ LIP websites to understand how organizations in the same space were approaching navigation, content hierarchy, accessibility, and communication.
We looked for patterns in questions such as:
- How do LIPs explain what they do to someone encountering the organization for the first time?
- How are resources and services organized?
- What information needs to be immediately accessible?
- How can a government- or nonprofit-adjacent organization feel welcoming rather than institutional?
- What accessibility and usability patterns could be carried into the new site?
The research gave us a clearer picture of the category while also highlighting an opportunity for WKLIP to establish its own identity.
Stakeholder research
Aligning the organization around the website
Because WKLIP was newly established, the website also needed to help clarify the organization's role.
We worked with stakeholders to understand the audiences they needed to reach, the information they wanted to communicate, and the relationships between WKLIP, newcomers, community organizations, and local service providers.
This helped us prioritize the content and structure of the site around what users actually needed to understand:
Who is WKLIP? What does it do? Who is it for? And where can people go for help or get involved?
That clarity became a key part of the design direction.
Stakeholder Interviews
Creating the design system
A visual language that felt welcoming and credible
The visual system was designed to balance two qualities that can easily conflict: warmth and credibility.
The site needed to feel approachable to people who might already be navigating an unfamiliar community, while also giving partner organizations confidence in WKLIP as a legitimate coalition.
We established a flexible UI system covering typography, spacing, colour, buttons, content blocks, navigation, and responsive layouts.
The system gave the site a consistent foundation while allowing different types of content, from organizational information to resources and community initiatives, to remain easy to scan and understand.
Design & development
From prototype to WordPress
We designed the prototype and UI system in Webflow, using reusable components and patterns to establish the visual language before development.
This approach also created a clear design-to-development handoff, reducing ambiguity around how the system should be implemented.
For the final build, we implemented a custom WordPress theme based on the approved designs, giving WKLIP a tailored experience while maintaining the flexibility to manage and update content internally.
The result
The final website gave WKLIP a professional digital foundation as it established itself in the West Kootenay region.
The experience makes the organization easier to understand, its work easier to discover, and its digital presence more aligned with the welcoming communities it is working to build.
The site was designed and developed as a flexible WordPress experience that could grow alongside the organization as its programs, partnerships, and community presence expanded.
Visit the live website: wklip.ca
