Rebuild
A site his own team could actually update.
Michael Walters · Edmonton, Alberta
A sitting city councillor with constituents to keep informed, and a website his office had effectively been locked out of. The platform it was built on made even small changes a problem, so the rebuild moved it somewhere the team could work.
Rebuild
CRM
Politics
The engagement
- ClientMichael Walters, Edmonton City Council
- IndustryPolitics · public communication
- What we didContent strategy · Information architecture · Design · WordPress development · SEO · CRM · Hosting and support
- LaunchedSeptember 2021
The challenge
Michael Walters was elected to Edmonton City Council in 2013 and re-elected in 2017, working on urban planning, economic diversification and how the city fits together with the region around it. Keeping constituents current on all of that is most of the job between elections.
The website was not helping. It had been built on NationBuilder during the campaign, and the platform his team could run an election on turned out to be one they could barely edit — changing how the site looked or what it did meant going back to someone else every time. A site nobody can update stops being a channel and becomes an archive.
What we did
- Moved somewhere the team could work. WordPress and Elementor, so updating a page stopped being a request and became something a staffer could do between meetings.
- Typography doing the work. A deliberately minimal design built on type rather than decoration, with a restrained palette drawn from the campaign colours and enough space around the text that long policy writing stays readable.
- Legible on what people actually use. Responsive throughout, because constituents read council updates on a phone, usually standing up.
- Campaign Monitor wired in. CRM integration so the office could grow the subscriber list and send updates itself, rather than publishing into silence.
The result
No performance figures are published for this engagement. We would rather show an honest gap than a number we can’t attribute to a source — which is the same standard we apply to the figures on the other seven.
No third-party figures available for this engagement
Is this your situation?
An organisation locked out of its own website by the platform it was built on is the situation this work is built for.