Campaign Microsite for New Orleans Black Education History Week

We seek a web designer to create the structure and design for a campaign microsite for New Orleans Black Education History Week (NOBEHW), a citywide commemoration taking place November 16–20, 2026.

The microsite is both a wayfinding tool and a teaching tool. Visitors should be able to find info on the events happening that week — and learn something about Black education history in New Orleans on the way there.

The site serves three audiences with distinct entry points: schools/students, educators, and community members engaging in the week. A fourth audience are folks who are outside of New Orleans but want to engage by purchasing merchandise, donations, and engaging with content on the microsite. We would like the site to include a social media hashtag feed and an educator recognition/nomination feature.

Our working concept is a historical timeline as the primary design feature, from around 1868 to the present, where key dates surface a piece of history relevant to the week's themes and the present-day schools connected to it. We are open to the designer challenging this concept.

Deliverables we're seeking:
Sitemap and information architecture across the four audience paths
Wireframes for the landing page and key subpages
High-fidelity design mockups applying our existing brand system
A build-ready handoff (design files plus specs) our team can execute against
Maintainability by a non-developer

A reference point we admire is the National Day of Racial Healing site.

We are hosting on Squarespace and need to launch by September 15, 2026.

BE NOLA exists to strengthen educational outcomes in New Orleans, a city where Black educational excellence has a long, deep, and largely underappreciated history. New Orleans Black Education History Week is our attempt to build a permanent civic container for that history — a week each November when schools, educators, and the public can learn from and celebrate a legacy that shaped generations of this city's children.
The microsite is how thousands of people find their way in. For a sixth grader, it's a place to learn about their school’s history and vote for their favorite teacher. For a teacher, it's the place to get connected to vibrant resources about this rich inheritance. For a community member it's a place to register for non-school based events and find other ways to participate.
Our first year sets the template for every year after. A designer who helps us get this right isn't building a one-time event page — they're shaping the front door to a commemoration we intend to run for decades.

We are prepared to brief you on our hosting platform, budget parameters, brand collateral and norms, and our stakeholder groups and target audiences.

This project is well underway on the content side. We have confirmed sponsors and community partners, activities, and a defined programming framework which will shape how site content is grouped and labeled. We have brand guidelines, photography, and draft language ready to share, plus sample sites we like.

A committee of New Orleans educators is already generating the content strategy this project will design against, and their notes will be shared with you at kickoff. Our Executive Director is leading this project directly and will be your single point of contact and decision-maker.

We are also working with a PR firm on a late-August public launch, so there is real organizational urgency and internal buy-in behind hitting our timeline. Your designs go straight into production — this is not a concept exercise.