The Spanish site we'd put off for years took ten minutes and one Claude request
We moved off Squarespace onto BlinkPages. Now I tell Claude the change I want and it's live the same morning, without going through anyone.
By Rose Ford, Director of Operations, Convergence
It has been such an amazing experience to be able to just go into my website in real time and make some quick edits. Not have to deal with going through someone else, or dealing with a complicated behind-the-scenes web builder.
Rose Ford Director of Operations, Convergence - Migrated from
- Squarespace
- Spanish site
- 1 request
- Brief to draft
- 9 minutes
- Pages
- 13 → 21
- Changes I shipped
- 25
- Homepage payload
- 99% less
Who we are, and what I actually do
Convergence supports American Veterans: mental health resources, disaster-response operations across the Caribbean and Central America, and a wellness retreat in Panama. I'm the Director of Operations. Like almost everyone here, I do it around other commitments.
Our website is usually the first real look a donor gets at us. Keeping it current is my job. For a long time it was also the thing I quietly dreaded.
Three things that used to stop me
None of these are exotic problems. If you run operations at a small nonprofit, I suspect you have all three.
- 1. Every small edit was a big process I'd have an internal debate about how badly I actually needed a change. To get one done I had to spec it out properly in an email to our website volunteer, wait for him to find time around his paying job, check whether it matched what I pictured, then ask for revisions if it didn't. So my list piled up. Not because the changes were hard, but because asking for them was.
- 2. I was afraid of breaking something My web design experience is two college classes around 2008 and a handful of self-taught page-builder sites since. I know enough to know I can knock padding out of alignment in some nested container and lose hours finding it. My teammates, who've never touched the back end, were even more wary. Access alone wouldn't have fixed that.
- 3. We were locked in When I took the site back over from a departing volunteer, we were on Squarespace, which I'd never used. (Did you know Squarespace actually holds all your videos hostage and exporting images can only be done one at a time? True story.) I wanted to move somewhere friendlier and found we couldn't leave cleanly. It felt like being held hostage without even the option of paying a ransom.
Win one after moving to BlinkPages: the Spanish site I'd given up on
This is my biggest win, and it's the one I'd tell another nonprofit about first.
We operate out of Panama. We've always known we needed a Spanish site. We never even priced it out, because it looked enormous and enormous things don't get started. It sat on the someday list for well over a year.
One request. A language switcher and a Spanish homepage went live on 23 July. We tested it out, and two days later Spanish was live on every page. Nineteen pages, both languages.
Then the part I didn't expect. Our site carries a standing rule now embedded in our CLAUDE.md file. Any time English copy changes, the Spanish changes in the same edit. New pages ship in both languages by default. Two days after the rollout we edited our English Operations headline and the Spanish updated by itself, in the same change, without anyone asking.
Yes, the Spanish was AI-drafted and I reviewed it. It's a great starting point. Once a page settles, a local Spanish speaker reads it and we make their edits in real time.
What it means day to day is simple. I send one link to our U.S. Veterans, to Spanish-speaking donors in Panama and Costa Rica, and to the community here who've been hearing about us and want to know more. Nothing to explain, nothing to translate on the fly.
Instead of having to hire someone and be billed out for each page individually, with one request I was able to get a Spanish version, and Claude rules keep it in sync when I update the English. If we'd stayed on Squarespace or WordPress, I would not have gotten this done.
Rose Ford
Win two: from a landing page brief to a live draft in nine minutes
Here's a real one, recorded start to finish. Our COO sent through a brief for a Wellness Recipes page. He'd sketched it quickly with AI between other projects, so it was a rough guide, and skimming it I could see it needed decisions I didn't want to make: how to structure it, whether recipes were separate pages or cards, where it belonged in the navigation.
Before, that brief would have become a carefully written email and a wait. Instead I handed the PDF to Claude Code, which is connected to our site, and talked to it the way I'd talk to a colleague.
It read the brief and came back with questions before writing anything. It flagged that the content had to stay educational rather than make treatment claims, given VA compliance sensitivities. It asked who needed to sign off. Then it mapped our existing site, checked for duplicate content, and proposed nesting the page at /retreat/wellness-recipes because that matched the pattern we already use for operations.
Nine minutes later I had a working draft. Expandable recipe cards, category pills, a safety disclaimer, a reusable card component so I can add recipes myself later, and a teaser section wired into the Retreat page.
It also built the Spanish version without being asked, because the sync rule from the bilingual rollout was already in place. That's the part that compounds: a decision made once in July now applies to everything I build afterwards.
After giving Claude the information for the retreat recipes build, we had a live draft in nine minutes. The whole session, including me reading the brief and answering its questions, was under half an hour.
It took us nine minutes for it to do that draft. And that's much less time than it would have taken me. And I would not have known how to build reusable card components or categorization pills. I would have had to hire someone or settle for a very basic layout.
Rose Ford
I don't have to be a web designer any more
The part that surprised me most wasn't the speed. It was that I stopped having to know (or pretend to know) web design.
When Claude asked whether I wanted individual recipe pages or expandable cards, it explained the trade-offs and made a recommendation. I picked. The pressure is off. I don't need to be a web designer, because Claude gives me some ideas and proactively lets me know what I might not have considered. That's the whole loop. It raises what I hadn't thought of, tells me what it would do and why, and I stay in charge. No pausing to sift through twenty YouTube tutorials or a page-builder help center.
The fear of breaking things is gone too, and not because I got braver. Every change is built as a draft first. I get a preview link, and I can view it side by side against the live site before anything publishes. If I don't like it, I discard it. Nothing to undo.
That also changed how we make decisions. I can ask for several versions of the same section, look at them side by side, and choose after they're built rather than guessing from a description.
And when it starts talking about components and Astro site technicalities, I don't need to follow. I just need the page to be right.
Unlike if I was messing around with a web builder and then got lost, or had to figure out how to hit back enough times to un-mess up what I did, this one, there's no stress.
Rose Ford
- Everything starts as a draft Nothing touches the live site until I say so. I get a preview URL I can send to our COO for review right in the Asana task where he first sent me the brief.
- Side-by-side against live I compare the draft with the current page before publishing, so I can see exactly what changes.
- Options, not guesswork Multiple versions of a section, built and viewable, then I pick. No wireframes, no imagining it from a paragraph of description.
Getting out was the hard part, and we didn't have to do it
None of the above could happen while we were stuck, and we genuinely were.
Squarespace offers one export format: WordPress XML. When I ran it, it offered three choices, so I ran all three. The files came back byte-identical. What was in them? Some pages. Not the collection pages, like our whole Operations section. And no media at all.
364 images in our library, downloadable one at a time. The testimonial video on our homepage couldn't be downloaded at all. Not slowly, not at reduced quality. This isn't a complaint about something going wrong, it's Squarespace's documented behaviour, in their own support article.
So I built a public page on our own site, dumped every image from the media library onto it, and sent the URL over so our photos could be scraped back out. That's what it took.
Then BlinkPages just handled it. Rather than relying on the export, the migration read our live site directly and rebuilt it: 198 files, 49.5 MB, in a single pass: every real page, 93 photos and graphics, and the full video with every quality rendition. The video Squarespace told me I couldn't download has been playing on our site since 30 June.
It also found things I didn't know were there. Our 13 real pages were hiding inside 43 published URLs, including 22 template demo pages that shipped with the theme and were never unpublished, all public and indexable. Our privacy policy and terms of service were placeholder Latin. Our 404 page said "Button Text." All of that got fixed on the way across.
The same homepage, before and after
Rebuilt page by page and checked at desktop, tablet and phone widths with zero measured differences, then improved from there. The "before" is rendered from the archived pre-migration snapshot; the site cut over on 30 June 2026.
What that adds up to
- 9 min
- Retreat recipes brief to a live draft Recorded start to finish on 4 August
- 1 request
- For an entire Spanish site 19 pages, then kept in sync automatically
- 25
- Changes shipped by me personally Ten of them in a single day
- 13 → 21
- Pages, plus 19 Spanish routes A whole new programme added in a week
- 99% less
- JavaScript and CSS on the homepage 5.93 MB across 36 files, down to 50 KB across 3
Build time from the recorded session of 4 August 2026. Page and language counts from the site's repository history. Payload measured on the live site against the archived pre-migration snapshot.
A Spanish site sat on our someday list for more than a year. Not because of the money. Because it looked enormous, and enormous things never get started when everyone is a volunteer.
It took one request and two days. What stays with me is not the two days. It is wondering what else I had quietly decided we couldn't do.
Rose Ford Director of Operations, Convergence What changed for me
My edit list doesn't pile up
Small changes take minutes, so I make them instead of weighing whether they're worth the process. Twenty-five have gone out under my own name, ten of them in one day.
I'm not afraid of the site any more
Everything starts as a draft with a preview link. I compare it against the live page before publishing, and discard anything I don't like. There's nothing to undo.
Big projects actually happen
A full Spanish site had sat on the someday list for over a year. It took one request and two days, and it stays in sync on its own.
A brief in the morning is a page the same morning
Our COO sends an idea, I hand it straight to Claude, and there's a reviewable draft before the day's meetings start.
The rest of the team can finally weigh in
They suggest edits straight from the live site view and I batch through them. A couple have even offered to learn to work with Claude the way I do, which would have been unthinkable when the site lived behind one login.
I choose between real options, not descriptions
I can ask for several versions of the same section, look at them side by side, and decide once they exist. No guessing from a wireframe or a paragraph someone wrote for me.
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