Asia Pacific Palliative Hospice Care Network
APHN is the regional body for hospice and palliative care across Asia and the Pacific. We rebuilt its website around membership, donations and resources for professionals in more than 15 countries, and we have hosted and supported it since 2019.
APHN now runs membership, donations, a members’ area and a Chinese edition on a WordPress rebuild we launched in 2019 and have hosted and cared for since.
What we were solving
The Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network (APHN) is a registered charity in Singapore. It promotes access to quality hospice and palliative care across the region by supporting the doctors, nurses, educators and organisations who deliver it, in more than 15 countries.
The website APHN had before us got in the way of that work. Navigation had no clear path for the people it served. The homepage looked dated and fonts and colours changed from page to page. The membership portal and payment area were hard to use, for members and for the small secretariat managing them.
Many members work in countries where English is a second language. The site also serves two groups at once: professionals looking for training, directories and research, and families arriving at a difficult moment. It had to work for both without instructions, make joining and renewing simple, and give the secretariat a membership system it could run day to day.
How we tackled it
A custom theme built around APHN’s values
We built a custom, responsive WordPress child theme on the Genesis Framework from APHN’s own brand assets. The structure was rebuilt around how people arrive: members, prospective members, donors and the public each have a clear route from the homepage. APHN’s values (respect for every individual, value for every moment of life, confidentiality) set the tone. Content sits in short sections so a visitor can learn at their own pace rather than meet a wall of information.
Membership and payments the secretariat can run
The membership system is the heart of the site. We set up individual and organisational memberships with recurring payment through Stripe and PayPal, migrated the existing member database and built registration forms in Gravity Forms that collect the professional details APHN needs and let the secretariat approve new members. Since then we have added membership fees by region, a members’ area with gated resources, an e-library, two service directories, an events calendar and online donations.
Hosting and care, year after year
APHN has been on our Website Care plan since the rebuild, with hosting on WP Engine that we manage. Weekly updates, plugin licences, security hardening after a 2020 review, storage upgrades and membership support tickets all run through the same team. Seven years in, Trudy Giam and the secretariat still send their membership questions to us.
What we delivered
APHN now runs aphn.org on the WordPress platform we built, in English and Chinese. Members join and renew online. Donors give through the Seeds of Support campaign. The site carries the APHN Atlas of Palliative Care 2025, the e-library, both service directories, webinars and the programme for the 17th Asia Pacific Hospice Conference in 2027. The footer still reads “Website by Chillybin Web Design Singapore”, and APHN is the site we point to when a regional charity asks for membership, donations and multilingual content in one place.
What we learned
Membership sites are operations projects. Seven years of secretariat questions have almost all been about renewals, expiry dates, who is in which tier and how to take a manual payment. Building the system so a small secretariat could answer those itself mattered more than any feature.
For a regional charity, consistency is a form of respect. Fixing the fonts and colours sounded cosmetic in 2019. For a visitor who does not read English fluently, a site that behaves the same on every page is the difference between finding help and giving up.
