A Website Worthy of the Sisterhood Amelia Earhart Started
How a 92-year-old aviation organization traded a dated, hard-to-manage website for one built to grow with them
Client Overview
The Ninety-Nines, Inc. is the international organization of licensed women pilots, founded in 1929 with Amelia Earhart as its first president. Ninety-two years later, it still exists to support, encourage, and connect women in aviation — from student pilots earning their first hours to veteran flight instructors.
Project Scope
JHD designed and built a new WordPress website for The Ninety-Nines from the ground up: a custom design, an intelligent CMS, an interactive chapter-finder map, a searchable blog and events calendar, multilingual support, and ADA-compliant accessibility.
Challenge and Innovation
A 92-year-old membership organization built on word of mouth needed to look and function like the modern, credible authority it actually is. The old site buried chapter information, scholarships, and events behind clunky navigation, on a system the team could barely update themselves. The real challenge wasn't cosmetic. It was giving a volunteer-run organization a site current and future teams could manage without calling a developer every time something changed.
JHD Solution
We built the new site on WordPress with a custom CMS and a live-preview page builder, so staff and chapter leaders can update content without touching code. An interactive map lets pilots find their local chapter by location instead of scrolling a list. Sitewide search filters results by date and content type, so a scholarship deadline or a magazine article surfaces in seconds. We layered in an events calendar, a blog, Facebook feed integration, Stripe-powered payments for memberships, event registrations, and donations, GTranslate for international members, and accessiBe to meet ADA compliance from day one.
Impact and Expansion
Ninety-Nines.org launched as a site built to grow alongside a 92-year-old organization instead of holding it back. Chapters, scholarships, and events now live in a system the team can manage themselves, and pilots searching for community, training, or funding find it in a few clicks instead of a phone call. The foundation is in place for whatever comes next — more chapters, more scholarships, more members finding their way to the sisterhood Amelia Earhart started.
Conclusion
Anyone can rebuild a website. The harder job is giving a historic, all-volunteer organization a site their own people can run, one built around how members actually search for community and support. JHD gave The Ninety-Nines a foundation as enduring as the organization itself — modern enough for today's aviators, flexible enough for the next ninety-two years.
