How POURPIS transformed the Wichita Area Arts Council’s website into an accessible community resource for artists, arts advocates, and everyone who believes creativity makes a city better
Client: Wichita Area Arts Council
Services: Digital strategy, digital accessibility legal-risk analysis, accessible website design and development, content strategy, custom functionality, accessibility testing, disabled-user testing, PDF accessibility, membership strategy, and ongoing website support
You guys are awesome and doing really cool things for the community. Your website should show people that.
That was one of the first things I told the Wichita Area Arts Council.
Because they were.
They supported artists. Awarded grants. Advocated for the arts. Hosted events. Recognized creative achievement. Connected people throughout Wichita’s arts community.
There was only one problem: you could not fully see any of that by looking at their website.
The Wichita Area Arts Council approached POURPIS because they needed a completely new, accessible website. But before I designed a page, selected a color, or began thinking about functionality, I started where I believe every successful website project should start.
I got to know them.
Before Building the Website, I Learned the Organization
I wanted to understand who they were, what they did, why they did it, and who they served.
That discovery process revealed something important. The Wichita Area Arts Council did not merely need a nicer website. It needed a digital home capable of representing the organization it had become and supporting the organization it was still becoming.
The website needed to serve artists, arts administrators, educators, advocates, event attendees, grant applicants, members, donors, and people who were simply curious about what was happening creatively in Wichita.
And it needed to help all of those people find what they needed without making them dig through a digital junk drawer.
So yes, the website needed to be beautiful.
I have always appreciated beauty because beauty rarely happens by accident. It reflects care, thought, effort, and intention. When an organization is doing meaningful work, its digital presence should be created with that same level of care.
But beauty was only the beginning.
The website also needed structure, purpose, personality, and accessibility built into it from the start. It needed to serve the people who depended on it, support the Arts Council’s programs, and address the legal risk created when people with disabilities cannot access an organization’s information, opportunities, forms, or services.
From an Organization’s Website to a Community Resource
Once I learned more about the Wichita Area Arts Council’s mission, I came to them with an idea.
What if the website did more than explain what the Arts Council does? What if it became a place where Wichita could discover its artists?
That idea became the Wichita Artist Directory, a growing collection of local artist profiles featuring biographies, artwork, disciplines, websites, and social media links.
Artists can create and manage their own profiles. Community members can explore the directory and discover creative talent working right here in Wichita.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone could come here and actually find the artists creating work in our city?
The directory supports the Arts Council’s mission while giving local artists greater visibility. It also gives the broader community a new way to engage with Wichita’s creative identity.
Because art does more than decorate a community. It gives a community its voice. It helps people understand one another, preserves stories, sparks ideas, creates belonging, and turns a collection of buildings into a place with a soul.
The directory will continue growing along with Wichita’s creative community.
If you are an artist in the Wichita area, you can create your Artist Directory profile and become part of it.
Making Decades of Arts History Searchable
The Arts Council’s annual Arts Awards are a major part of its history.
Established in 1969, the awards recognize people and organizations whose creative achievements, leadership, and support have contributed to the cultural life of the Greater Wichita area.
That meant the new website needed to do more than promote the next ceremony. It needed to preserve and showcase decades of recognition.
I created a custom awards feature that allows visitors to search past recipients by name or year. Instead of leaving that history buried in documents or scattered records, the website turns it into something the public can explore.
Visitors can discover the artists, advocates, educators, organizations, and community leaders who helped shape Wichita’s cultural landscape.
The site also gives the annual Arts Awards Ceremony the prominence it deserves. This is the Arts Council’s largest event of the year, bringing together artists, music, food, community, celebration, and the recognition of people doing extraordinary creative work.
In other words, it is a pretty big deal. The website finally treats it like one.
Creating More Ways for People to Participate
Not every visitor arrives at the Arts Council’s website with the same goal.
Some are looking for grants. Some want to nominate an artist for an award. Some want to meet other creative people. Some want to support the organization. Others may not yet know what they are looking for.
The new website was organized around those different paths.
One of the most inviting ways to get involved is through the Arts Council’s monthly Arts Mixrs. These free gatherings take place at different arts and cultural venues around Wichita, giving attendees a behind-the-scenes look at the spaces, artists, and organizations shaping the city.
I like to think of them as monthly arts field trips for adults.
You get to visit inspiring places, experience remarkable art, learn something new, and connect with people who understand why any of that is exciting. They are informal, welcoming, free to attend, and open to everyone.
The website gives the Arts Council a dedicated place to feature each upcoming Arts Mixr, share details about the venue, collect RSVPs, and help more people find their way into Wichita’s arts community.
Supporting the Arts Council’s Next Chapter
A good organizational website should not merely hold today’s information. It should be able to support tomorrow’s ideas.
That became especially important with the launch of FORGE, the Arts Council’s five-week leadership experience for artists, arts administrators, educators, and cultural advocates ready to make an impact beyond their own creative work.
FORGE helps participants strengthen their voices, expand their influence, and take a more active role in Wichita’s cultural future.
The website needed to do more than announce the program. It needed to explain the opportunity, build excitement, answer prospective applicants’ questions, and support the application process.
That meant creating the program page, structuring its message, and developing a polished application experience capable of collecting detailed information without feeling overwhelming.
As the Arts Council grows, the website is ready to grow with it, supporting new programs and ideas as they take shape.
Turning Membership Into a Meaningful Invitation
The Arts Council also wanted to expand its membership program, but its leaders were still determining how membership should work and how it should be presented.
So I helped them figure it out.
My role went beyond adding a “Become a Member” button. I conducted extensive research, explored how comparable organizations approached membership, helped shape the membership levels, and developed language that connected each tier to a meaningful form of participation.
The resulting structure welcomes students and emerging creatives, community supporters, arts advocates, civic leaders, and people prepared to make a long-term investment in Wichita’s cultural future.
Each tier explains who it is for, what it supports, and how membership strengthens the Arts Council’s work.
Because people should not have to decipher an organization’s internal funding strategy before deciding whether they care.
They need to understand where they belong, why their participation matters, and what becomes possible when they say yes.
Building for Accessibility and Reducing Legal Risk
Accessibility was part of the website from the beginning. So was legal-risk analysis.
An inaccessible website can do more than frustrate a visitor. It can prevent someone with a disability from applying for a grant, submitting an award nomination, joining an organization, registering for an event, making a donation, or accessing information available to everyone else.
Those barriers can violate civil-rights laws and lead to litigation.
My approach was informed by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, federal enforcement actions, accessibility settlement agreements, and the patterns that repeatedly appear in website accessibility lawsuits.
That legal perspective affected how I prioritized the work.
I paid particular attention to the parts of the website where an accessibility barrier could prevent someone from completing a meaningful action. That included forms, applications, event registration, donations, membership, navigation, downloadable documents, and third-party functionality.
I also considered the practices frequently required in accessibility settlements and enforcement agreements: established technical standards, manual evaluation, testing by people with disabilities, accessible feedback mechanisms, documentation, vendor accountability, and continued attention after launch.
This is an important distinction. A website can pass an automated scan and still contain barriers serious enough to exclude someone from an organization’s programs or services.
Legal risk cannot be evaluated by counting automated errors alone. It requires understanding what the barrier is, where it occurs, who it affects, what it prevents them from doing, and how significant that interaction is.
That analysis shaped how pages were structured, how headings were organized, how links and buttons were named, how forms were built, how keyboard users moved through the site, how focus appeared, how content responded to magnification and text spacing, and how information was communicated to assistive technology.
Accessibility is not a final coat of paint. It is part of the architecture, the organization’s risk strategy, and the experience it promises the public.
The site was developed with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in mind, including requirements affecting:
- Keyboard navigation
- Screen-reader compatibility
- Visible keyboard focus
- Color contrast
- Form labels and instructions
- Descriptive headings and links
- Alternative text for meaningful images
- Responsive reflow and magnification
- Touch-target sizing
- Error identification
- Consistent navigation
- Accessible status messages
- Content clarity and organization
Automated tools were used where appropriate, but an automated scan alone cannot prove that a website is accessible.
Automated tools can identify certain patterns in code. They cannot reliably tell you whether a person can understand the website, complete an application, navigate a directory, submit a form, or accomplish the reason they visited in the first place.
That requires manual testing, human judgment, and an understanding of how technical barriers exclude disabled people and become the basis of accessibility lawsuits.
Navigating Third-Party Accessibility
The Arts Council wanted to integrate an external community calendar into the site. Third-party products introduce an important accessibility consideration because the organization using the product may not control its underlying code.
A blind screen-reader user tested the calendar and found it highly usable. In fact, she described it as the most accessible calendar she had used.
That was excellent news.
Screen-reader accessibility, however, is only one part of WCAG. Additional testing identified opportunities involving other accessibility criteria. I documented those findings and shared them directly with the calendar provider so its team could evaluate them for future improvements.
This is how responsible accessibility work often happens in the real world.
Organizations depend on software, platforms, and integrations created by other companies. When an accessibility concern cannot be corrected directly, the appropriate next step is to document it, communicate with the provider, understand the practical impact, and continue advocating for improvement.
Accessibility is not always a neat little checkbox. Sometimes it requires partnership, persistence, and knowing what to do when the code belongs to someone else.
Making the Big Ideas Plan Accessible
The Arts Council’s Big Ideas plan presents an extensive three-year vision for the organization and Wichita’s arts community.
The plan needed to remain available as a PDF, which created a separate accessibility responsibility. A PDF does not become accessible simply because someone uploads it to an accessible website.
PDF accessibility requires specialized work, including proper document structure, reading order, headings, lists, table markup, alternative text, link treatment, and compatibility with assistive technology.
For this portion of the project, I brought in a company known for rigorous PDF accessibility remediation. Its specialists complete months of training before they are permitted to remediate client documents.
That is exactly the level of expertise I wanted handling the Arts Council’s plan.
When the remediated PDF was returned, I did not simply assume the work was correct because an expert had completed it.
I tested it. It passed.
Working with specialists is important. Verifying their work is part of the job too.
Then I Asked a Blind User to Test Everything
After development was complete, I hired a blind screen-reader user to test the website.
She spent approximately seven hours examining key pages, important features, and essential user flows with her screen reader.
She navigated the website. Explored its content. Tested the forms. Reviewed the controls. Moved through critical interactions. And, yes, she tested the Artist Directory I had been especially concerned about.
Her response amazed even me.
This is the best website I’ve ever used. Everything was accessible to me.
I was thrilled. I was also curious.
There were a couple of complex website elements I wanted to understand more deeply, particularly the Artist Directory. Her report said they worked beautifully with her screen reader, but I wanted to hear the website in action for myself.
So I asked her a very professional, executive-level question:
“Can I come over?”
Showing up at a tester’s apartment to listen as she navigated a website may not be typical CEO behavior. But I care more about getting things right than I care about being normal.
She graciously accepted.
I sat beside her and watched as she navigated the pages. I listened as her screen reader announced the headings, links, controls, profile information, and interactive elements.
And there it was. Everything worked.
Hearing the website through her screen reader gave me the clearest confirmation possible: she could navigate it successfully and independently.
That is the standard that matters.
The Final Deliverable Was More Than a Website
At the end of the project, the Arts Council received a beautiful, organized, mission-driven website built to serve Wichita’s creative community.
It also received a detailed, multipage accessibility report documenting what had been tested and the results.
The finished project included:
- A complete website redesign and rebuild
- Accessibility incorporated throughout design and development
- Clearer organization around the Arts Council’s mission and audiences
- A growing, self-managed Artist Directory
- Searchable historical Arts Awards records
- Dedicated Arts Awards nomination and ceremony experiences
- Arts Mixr event promotion and RSVP functionality
- Grant information and application support
- FORGE program messaging and application functionality
- Membership research, strategy, tiers, and positioning
- Donation and sponsorship pathways
- An accessible Big Ideas PDF
- Manual accessibility evaluation
- Automated testing used as one component of a larger process
- Seven hours of testing by a blind accessibility professional
- Real assistive-technology verification
- A comprehensive accessibility testing report
This is what accessible website development looks like when it is approached seriously.
It is not installing a widget.
It is not running a scan, watching the score turn green, and declaring victory.
It is learning the organization. Understanding its audiences. Designing the structure. Building accessible components. Testing essential user flows. Coordinating specialized expertise when necessary. Working constructively with third-party providers. Inviting disabled people into the process. Documenting the findings. And verifying that the experience works in real life.
A Website Worthy of the Work Behind It
The Wichita Area Arts Council is doing important work for artists and for the city.
Now its website shows it.
The new site gives local artists a place to be discovered. It preserves decades of arts history. It helps people find programs, grants, events, leadership opportunities, and ways to contribute. It supports the organization’s future instead of limiting it.
It is vibrant because the Wichita arts community is vibrant.
It is organized because people deserve to find what they need.
It is accessible because disabled people are part of the community too.
And yes, it is beautiful.
Why build a brand-new website if it is not going to look fabulous?
Your Website Can Be Beautiful and Accessible Too
Accessibility does not require sacrificing creativity, personality, sophistication, or visual impact.
It requires expertise, intention, and a willingness to care about the experience all the way through.
If your organization needs more than a website vendor, POURPIS can lead the strategy, accessibility, execution, testing, and coordination required to build a digital experience everyone can use.
Let’s build a website worthy of the work you do.
Working with Vanessa at POURPIS was a wonderful experience. POURPIS took our vision for the Wichita Area Arts Council website and transformed it into something far greater than we imagined. They delivered a beautiful, accessible website while introducing innovative solutions like the Wichita Artist Directory and custom application systems that streamlined our grants and awards processes. Vanessa’s strategic thinking, creativity, and accessibility expertise resulted in a website that not only represents our organization beautifully, but also better serves Wichita’s artists and the entire community. POURPIS didn’t simply build us a website. They created an invaluable resource for the Arts in Wichita.
Connie Bonfy
Executive Director, Wichita Area Arts Council
