A founder with a story, a vision, and no site.
Breaking Free IPSA is a survivor-led community bringing awareness to intimate partner sexual abuse. The founder came in with real material — her own survivor stories, educational articles on coercive control and trafficking, a mission she had already written, and a clear sense of how she wanted the site to feel. Safe. Warm. Hopeful. Never clinical.
What the site had to do was harder than what it had to say. The people it exists for are not browsing. They are searching alone, often on a device someone else can see, using words they have never said out loud. The site had to hold them the second they landed.
She came in with a direction in mind. She got two.
Two concepts. One choice.
She was not handed one interpretation of her brief and asked to approve it. She got her own direction fully built, and a second one to weigh it against.
Her direction, fully built.
Modeled on her vision document and on a site she already owned. Mission-first: the hero carried the mission statement, followed by vision, the founder's story, survivor stories, blog, contact.
Deep blue and green tones anchoring the page, broken up with white and cream. Her structure, her order, her palette instinct — rendered as a working site instead of a document she had to imagine.
Same content. A different answer to who the page is talking to.
The hero stopped announcing and started speaking. Her draft opened on the mission. Mine opened on the reader — “You are seen. You are heard. You are not alone.” The mission still matters. It just isn't the first thing a woman reads at 2am when she is trying to find out whether what happened to her has a name.
The color reversed the temperature. Blues and greens are calm colors, but they are also institutional ones — the palette of hospitals, clinics, legal aid offices. This audience has usually been through those rooms already. Concept two moved to warm cream, soft rose, and plum: the register of care rather than treatment.
The layout stopped presenting and started inviting. The order followed the survivor's arrival rather than the organization's story — what she needs to feel, then what she needs to know, then what she can do. More space, softer transitions, nothing crowding a reader who is already carrying enough.
She chose the second one.
She saw two directions fully built — including her own — and chose with her eyes instead of her imagination. She picked mine because she could see the difference, not because she was told there was one.
Built correctly from the beginning. Nothing retrofitted.
No template. No plugin bolted on after launch. Content strategy, structure, and technical foundation were decided before a single page was drafted.
Content architecture set before design
Stories, blog, and resources were mapped as distinct sections answering distinct questions before any layout work began. The navigation is the content strategy, not a menu drawn around a template.
Answer-first page structure
Every page opens with the answer. Each story, article, and resource entry is self-contained and quotable — the format AI systems pull from when they build a response.
An AI-readable foundation, in from day one
Server-rendered pages AI crawlers can read. A clean XML sitemap covering all 14 pages. A robots.txt that permits the crawlers that matter. And a hand-written llms.txt describing the site's purpose, sections, and content warnings in plain language, so AI systems summarizing this site get it right. All live at launch.
A design system verified to WCAG AA
Every text and background pairing across the palette verified programmatically against AA contrast before launch, with content warnings placed ahead of heavier material.
A crisis resource layer, added and verified
Emergency numbers surfaced on the page and a Canada-first resource set built in: Assaulted Women's Helpline, 9-8-8, ShelterSafe. Every line confirmed live before publishing, and confirmed again before launch. A survivor who calls a dead number does not call twice.
A resources page organized by where she is
Crisis support, counseling, safety planning, and healing separated into categories, so a visitor finds what fits her situation instead of scanning one undifferentiated list.
A submission process she runs herself
Survivor stories come in, get reviewed, and get published on a documented workflow the founder owns and operates independently. No queue. No waiting on a vendor to publish another woman's words.
What she owns
A live site at breakingfree-ipsa.com. Fourteen pages. A design system she can extend. A content structure that holds up as she adds stories. Built once, correctly, from the beginning.
This project has been on my heart for 15 years. I wasn't quite sure how to bring my idea to life. DLaurie AI helped me make my idea a reality and it truly touched my heart and made me emotional. As a survivor of IPSA, this website is a part of my foundation to give back and help others. DLaurie AI's vision complemented mine and created a beautiful website I will always be thankful for.
Founder, Breaking Free IPSA