Discovery
A fixed read of audiences, content, accessibility risk, and technical constraints. Ends in a scope a committee can procure, including what should wait.
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Services
Design, build, and sustain.
Three practices, one engagement. A public website fails when design, implementation, and the people who publish are procured as if they were separate products.
01 — Design
Public tasks, then pages.
We start with the jobs residents, families, students, and staff already try to finish: apply, enroll, pay, report, find a meeting, understand a closure. The sitemap follows those jobs. Department landing pages still exist. They stop being the only way in.
- Research with editors and front-line staff, not only communications
- Information architecture across departments that share a header and little else
- Component design systems with rules for alerts, agendas, directories, and forms
- Content models and plain-language patterns writers can reuse
- Prototypes of the two or three journeys that currently generate the most calls
02 — Build
A stack the institution can keep.
Drupal fits complex, multi-department properties with serious workflow and structured content. WordPress fits smaller offices that need editors in production quickly. A custom application is the right call when the public task is not a page — a permit wizard, a school finder, a rider alert.
- Implementation, theming, and integration with payments, directories, and calendars
- Migration plans, URL redirects, and a cutover that stays up
- Role design, SSO where the identity team already has it, and audit-friendly publishing
- Performance budgets suited to shared devices and uneven connections
- Repository, hosting, and analytics accounts opened in the institution’s name
03 — Sustain
After the ribbon, the policy changes.
Accessibility, training, and care are how a public site stays legal and useful. We document conformance against WCAG 2.2 AA, retest critical journeys, and train the departments who will touch the templates.
- Remediation and regression checks, with a defect log your counsel can read
- Editor training by role, using the institution’s own content
- Retainers with named response times for breakage, campaigns, and template changes
- Quarterly reviews of accessibility, search, and unfinished tasks
- Analytics that count completed services
Engagement models
Buy the phase you can award.
Project build
Design, implementation, migration, and launch against that scope. Assumptions are listed. Out-of-scope work does not hide inside “CMS configuration.”
Care retainer
A monthly practice for defects, small improvements, and publishing support. Cancelable. The institution keeps every account either way.
RFP support
We join as prime or subcontractor, answer written questions, and shape a response evaluators can score without a follow-up interview to learn the price.
What we will not sell you.
No proprietary page builder you cannot leave. No accessibility “phase two” on a site already in front of the public. No analytics property or domain registration held in the studio’s name. No dark patterns on applications, payments, or opt-ins. Public services do not need them, and procurement should not have to police them later.