A website built for visitors who may need to leave it in a hurry

Some of the people reading this site are not safe while they read it

In their own words, "Safe+Sound Somerset helps survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence with compassionate, trained professional help." Their website is where many of those people start.

Most websites can assume a reader who is comfortable and has time. This one cannot. Someone looking for help here may be on a shared computer, or on a phone that another person checks, under stress and with only a few minutes. For that visitor, the site has two jobs: get them to the right help fast, and let them leave fast.

Behind the site is a small communications and development staff. They have built up a large library of local services and educational material, and they are the ones who keep it current. They needed a website that served the visitor in crisis first, and that did not need a developer every time a program changed.

A thousand entries are no help to someone with two minutes

The library is the most valuable thing on the site, and at its size it could easily become the hardest thing to use. More than a thousand entries cover local services and learning material for parents, teens, teachers, and professionals. A parent looking for a counselor nearby should not have to scroll through hundreds of listings to find one. A visitor who does not know what the service they need is called has to be able to start from the need itself.

Some visitors do not read English comfortably. Others cannot read a screen easily at all. Whatever they came to find has to be reachable by them, on the device they happen to have.

Then there is the staff's side. A library like this only stays useful if it keeps growing. If each new resource has to pass through a developer, it grows at the speed of a support queue, and good material waits in an inbox while the people who need it cannot see it.

And the site has to be there. Nobody looks for this kind of help on a schedule.

We started with the visitor who has the least time

Every page carries a Leave Site button that stays fixed on the screen. One click, one tap, or the Escape key, and the visitor is looking at Google. Pressing Back does not bring the page up again.

It gives someone a way to get off the page quickly when another person walks into the room. We are careful not to promise more than that. The Safety Net project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence is plain that a button like this does not hide a visit from a person who checks browser history or monitors the device. So it does one job, in a single motion, from a mouse, a touchscreen, or a keyboard.

We organized the two libraries the way a person actually looks for things. The Resource Directory is browsed by need, so a visitor can start from what they need without knowing what the service is called. The Learning Center filters by who you are, by topic, and by format, so a teacher or a teen gets to a short list that fits them.

Reading help is built into the page. Visitors can have text read aloud, translated, or enlarged with higher contrast from a toolbar on the site itself, so nobody has to install anything or hunt for a separate accessibility page.

Staff publish on their own. They add a resource, choose its categories, and it shows up in search and in the filters right away, so the library grows at the pace of the organization.

The staff run it, and it is there at any hour

Today a visitor with very little time can get from the whole library to a short list in a few clicks, and can be looking at a different website a moment later if they need to be. A visitor who needs the page read aloud, or in another language, has that on the device in their hand.

The staff add to the library and reorganize it themselves. When they want a change that goes beyond publishing, they ask us. Our part is the quiet work underneath: hosting, security, updates, and answering when something needs attention. For a site that people turn to at any hour, staying out of the way and staying up is most of the job.