An Association Website with WordPress and Divi

What this site is

Dalyvus.lt is the website of the Vilnius region multiple sclerosis association. The organisation works with people living with multiple sclerosis: it provides information support, organises meetings and training, and represents the interests of its members.

The site has an information section about the illness, a section about the organisation with news, a gallery and partners, a membership and volunteering page, a donations section with information about the 1.2% income tax contribution, and contacts. Technically it is WordPress with the Divi editor.

Why WordPress here rather than Astro.js

My main offer is Astro.js with a content system, but this project went the other way — and that was a deliberate decision, not a compromise.

An organisation works with the site, not one person

In an association the content is prepared by staff and volunteers, and those people change over time. A system whose interface someone has seen before is worth more here than any technical advantage: a new person should not need separate training to publish a news item.

The second practical benefit follows from that — the site does not stay tied to me. There are many WordPress specialists, so any of them can take the work over. That matters more to an organisation than to a commercial company: decisions here are made for longer than one contract.

The page structure is not known in advance

On a business site you can plan fairly precisely which pages will exist in a year. On an organisation’s site you cannot: a new project, programme, partner or campaign appears, and it needs a page. A visual editor does real work here rather than being a feature kept just in case.

Part of the content is seasonal

The donations section with the 1.2% tax information is updated every year. Content like that has to be changeable in a few minutes and without a developer — otherwise it simply stays out of date.

What this means in practice

The organisation gets access to the panel, the code and the hosting, publishes news and fills the gallery itself, and can assemble new pages without me. If help is needed, hourly maintenance starts at €8 per hour, with no mandatory subscriptions.

Who the same solution fits

If several people will be filling in your content, if the structure will grow unpredictably, and if it matters that any specialist can take the work over, then WordPress is a logical choice — even if you hear elsewhere that it is slow. Slowness is created not by the system but by what gets piled on top of it. Where that has already happened, the answer is speed optimization rather than a different CMS.

When the content is strictly structured and repeats, the same question is answered the other way round — as it was on Šviesi galva.