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Rare Dimension

Women for Afghan Women

Women for Afghan Women (WAW) is a grassroots civil society organization founded in 2001, dedicated to empowering Afghan women and girls in both Afghanistan and the United States. 
Services
Web Design & Development
Photo Editing
Industry
Non-profit
Location
New York City, NY
brief
Women for Afghan Women came to Rare Dimension needing a complete website rebuild. Their existing site, built in 2018, had grown dated and difficult to maintain. The WordPress installation ran on a moderately heavy theme that slowed the site down and made updates a chore for their internal team. WAW needed a modern, accessible site that matched the scale of their work, and a back end their own staff could handle. Rare Dimension proposed rebuilding on a lightweight WordPress framework with a cleaner, higher-contrast design system.
strategy
Rare Dimension rebuilt the site from the ground up using Bricks Builder, a lightweight WordPress framework that cut page weight and improved load times by 50%. We restructured the back end so WAW's team could find and edit things without hunting, which is what had kept them from updating the old site. The redesign uses higher-contrast sections and a clearer type hierarchy, which helps both readability and accessibility. The site is simple enough for their team to run day to day and fast enough for readers on slow connections.
The homepage, top to bottom.
The same page on a phone.
process & Results
We worked with WAW's team through three rounds of design revisions, adjusting the layout and visual hierarchy until it felt right to them. Their existing brand colors were applied in high-contrast combinations to improve legibility without changing their look. Desktop and mobile were both tuned for speed, which matters when your readers are in places where connections are slow. The type and content structure keep pages readable at any screen size.

A page we like

The Afghanistan page, end to end. Notes change as it goes past.

01

The numbers go first

Two figures sit above the headline: how many Afghans need humanitarian assistance, and how many people WAW reached last year. Leading with the scale means the sentence underneath can stay quiet and still land.

02

One idea at a time

The story runs as alternating blocks, copy on one side and photographs on the other, swapping sides as you go down. Nothing competes for the same eye line, and every photo is WAW's own, taken in the places being described.

03

A full stop, in teal

One line, full width, in their own color. It breaks the reading rhythm right before the densest part of the page, so nobody arrives at the programs section already tired.

04

Programs you can actually scan

Six programs, each tagged with its protection area and the partner funding it, with the regions and beneficiary counts set in bold inside the paragraph. Those numbers are the part people retain, so the type gives them the weight.

05

Then the receipts

Three photographs across the full width, then the year's figures with the annual report sitting right next to them. Anyone who wants to check the source is one click from it.

The full Women for Afghan Women Afghanistan page, top to bottom

Campaign work

Every campaign gets its own moment on the site. This is the one running now, rebuilt here from the markup on their homepage. Open it.