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Some organizations are best described by a list of programs. The Milana Family Foundation is better described by a calendar. Since 2007 it has brought people together, on golf courses, around lunch tables and at charity dinners, to support causes close to the Milana family. The new website we built with the Foundation is organized around exactly that: the gatherings, the people who come to them, and the work they pay for.
The Foundation is based in Oyster Bay, New York, and for years it supported organizations such as the Columbus Citizens Foundation, Smile Farms, Cohen Children’s Medical Center, the Cooley’s Anemia Foundation and Stop Abuse. In 2018 its mission became personal. After Tom Milana’s own prostate cancer diagnosis, the Foundation turned its focus to men’s health, and today it powers Man Cave Health, the nonprofit bringing free PSA screenings, mobile Van Caves and virtual support groups to men across the country. We wrote about building the Man Cave Health website separately; this is the story of its sister site.
Built from their design
The Foundation came to us with a design of its own, made in Figma, and our job was to build it faithfully and make it work. The home page reads as one continuous story: who the Foundation is, why its cause changed, what Man Cave Health does, the annual golf event, recent events, a way to get in touch and a way to give. The words are the Foundation’s.
A few small details we cared about along the way. The “years of impact” figure on the home page is calculated from the founding year rather than typed in, so it can never quietly go out of date. And neighboring sections alternate their backgrounds, so each part of the story reads as its own chapter.
Every event, with its own page
The heart of the site is Events. It holds 26 events going back to the Foundation’s first golf outing in 2016, from the annual golf outings at Fresh Meadow Country Club and the charity lunches at Rao’s to the Man Cave Health ribbon cutting at Mount Sinai and this fall’s First Annual Legacy Celebration. Visitors can filter by golf outings, health events or charity and social gatherings.
Every event now has a page of its own, and many carry a full photo gallery that opens into a lightbox. Bringing those galleries together was one of the most rewarding parts of the project: years of photographs, gathered from the family’s folders and the old site, sorted into the event each one belongs to. When a photograph is cut down to fit a card, it is cut around the faces in it, so nobody on a card loses their head. Everywhere else, photographs are shown whole.
A site their team runs
We built the Foundation an admin of its own. When the team adds an event or a batch of photographs there, the website shows it within about a minute, with no developer involved and no new version of the site to publish. The next upcoming event is featured on the home page automatically and moves into the archive by itself once it has passed. Photographs are resized in the browser as they are added, so a phone full of event pictures can go straight into a gallery.
The same admin is where the team reads every message sent through the contact form, sees donations as they arrive, and checks how the site is being visited.
Giving, simply
For a family foundation, the donation form is the reason the site exists. Giving runs through Stripe, one-time or monthly, and the card details never touch the website itself. Every donor receives a tax receipt by email with the Foundation’s EIN on it, and the team sees each gift in their admin.
Careful with what already worked
The Foundation’s old site had years of pages behind it, and every one of those addresses now redirects to its new home, so old links in emails, posts and search results still land somewhere useful. The site is fast on a phone, and it is built so search engines and AI assistants can read who the Foundation is and what each event was. Each event page tells them its date and location in a form they understand.
The domain also carries the Foundation’s email, so we treated the move with care: we recorded every mail setting before the switch and confirmed afterward that each one was exactly as it had been.
Thank you
Thank you to Tom and Adriana Milana, Theresa Milana and the whole family for trusting us with the Foundation’s story and its photographs, which are, in the end, the story of a great many people showing up for one another.
If you would like to support the work, the Foundation would be glad of your help. And if you are a man who has not had a PSA test, or has not had one in a while, Man Cave Health can help you find a free screening.
