The Foundation for Innovations in Health website on desktop and mobile: the Health for a billion homepage beside the contact screen, on an olive ground

FIH Website Redesign

WebsiteRedesignUI/UXCMS Kolkata & Rural India 2026

The Foundation for Innovations in Health runs digital clinics in Birbhum, a medical boat in the Sundarbans, and training programmes that put rural young people into hospital jobs. It is complicated work, done in places most donors will never visit.

All of that had to fit on a website, and the old one left visitors to piece it together themselves. Our brief was simple to say and hard to do. A CSR head with ninety seconds should be able to understand what FIH does, believe it is real, and know how to fund it.

fihruralhealth.org

The rebuilt site

One sentence carries the whole organisation, and everything below it is proof. Health for a billion sits alone at the top of the page, followed straight away by the two things FIH actually does.

FIH homepage hero: the headline Health for a billion beside an illustration of hands holding a map of India — The homepage opens with the mission and two buttons, not a slideshow

Two programme cards on the FIH homepage: Accessible Primary Care and Employment-Oriented Education — The whole organisation as two doors: healthcare and education. Everything else lives behind one of them

Cutting it down

Simplification

The hardest part of this project was not building anything. It was deciding what to leave out.

FIH does a great deal, and every part of it matters to someone inside the organisation. But a visitor is not reading a report. They are scanning, deciding whether to trust you, and leaving. So we made a rule for the whole site. One idea per screen, and no screen that exists only to introduce another screen.

Two paths, not twelve

Healthcare and education. Every programme, project and story hangs off one of those two, so nobody has to hold a menu in their head.

Numbers where the claim is

Clinic counts, cost per visit and placement figures sit next to the sentence they support, not in a statistics page nobody opens.

Plain words

Task-shifting became what it actually means: a trained health worker does the visit, a doctor joins by video. The jargon stayed for the people who need it, further down.

The work, shown as work

Visual ethnography

Non-profit websites tend to fill up with stock photography. It costs them the one thing they cannot buy back: being believed. Nothing on this site is bought.

Every image is from the field. The boat clinic pulling into a bank in the Sundarbans, a health worker with a tablet, a classroom of trainees, a scan room. We treated the photography as evidence, not decoration. So we kept the frames wide, left the ordinary details in, and wrote captions that say where you are and what is happening.

The same rule shaped Stories of Change. Real faces, real names, real jobs, laid out as a wall of portraits you can scroll through. It reads like a village, which is what it is.

The FIH Our Work page opening on the floating digital clinic spotlight — Our Work opens on the boat, because the boat is the thing people remember

A full-width pull quote about the Floating Digital Clinic being a lifeline in the Sundarbans — A field quote given a full screen of its own, in the brand's amber

The Stories of Change page, a dark wall of portraits from FIH programmes — Stories of Change: portraits of people from the programmes, not stock imagery

The FIH mentor group carousel showing named board members with their roles — The people behind the foundation, named and shown, which is what institutional partners look for first

Built to open fast

Performance

A lot of this site's audience is on a phone on a rural network. A page that takes six seconds does not get read, however good it is. So speed was a design constraint from day one, not a cleanup task at the end.

The site is a Next.js application on the App Router with Tailwind. It serves pre-rendered pages, modern image formats sized to their slot, and fonts that never block the first paint. Measured from a cold load on a desktop connection, here is where it lands.

0.3s

Server response

Time to first byte across the six main pages, measured cold.

0.6s

First paint

Typical first contentful paint on interior pages.

Fully loaded

Most pages finish loading inside a second, images included.

Pages measured

Home, Our Work, About, Stories of Change, CSR Projects and Donate.

Measured with a headless Chrome run against the live site, cold cache, 1440px desktop viewport. Real-world timings on a rural mobile connection will be slower, which is exactly why the budget is this tight.

One kit, many pages

Design system

Everything on the site is built from a small set of parts. A new programme page can be made in an afternoon and still look like it belongs.

Amber is the only accent colour and it has one job: telling you where to act. Every donate button, every active state, every eyebrow label. Black carries structure, white carries reading. Poppins for headings, Lato for body text, both chosen for how they hold up at small sizes on a cheap screen.

Programme card. Image, label, title, one line, one button. Used for healthcare, education, projects and campaigns.
Spotlight band. A full-width photograph with a story panel beside it, for the boat clinic and other flagship projects.
Pull quote. A single amber screen with a field quote, used sparingly so it keeps its force.
Portrait wall. The layout behind both Stories of Change and the mentor group.
Notification bell. Live field updates from the CMS, with unread state remembered between visits.

Brand colours

Action Amber

1 #FBBF24

Structure Charcoal

2 #1A1A1A

Responsive

Made for a phone first

The mobile layout is not the desktop one squeezed. The headline breaks to fit the width it actually has, the menu collapses to a single button, the notification bell stays within reach of a thumb, and the two programme doors stack in the order they matter.

We set the type sizes by reading the site outdoors on a mid-range Android phone. That is closer to how it gets used than any lab test.

The FIH homepage on an iPhone, showing the collapsed navigation and stacked hero — The homepage on a phone

The team runs it now

Handover

The site is wired to Sanity, so field staff publish health camps, alerts and new stories themselves. Nobody has to file a ticket with a developer to announce a camp that is happening on Saturday.

That was the real deliverable. A website a non-profit needs a studio to update is a website that goes stale by the second month.