How we work
We work closely with user researchers and designers to understand how your site or service can be improved, using insights from real users.
Discovery research and planning
Content audits
We use automated and manual tools to review your entire site. We look for content that can be updated, streamlined, and rewritten using easy-to-understand plain language. We deliver our findings so you know exactly what steps to take to make major improvements.
Accessibility testing
We combine automated and manual testing to identify key accessibility gaps. We know there’s an art to reading accessibility reports — we aim to deliver a list of updates to make a meaningful impact.
User research
We work with real people who use your site to learn about what does and doesn’t work. We identify pain points to alleviate, and bright spots to accentuate. And we know that the staff who maintain a website are just as important as your residents or other users — we work with staff to understand what they need in a new site, and their current business needs.
Migration and development
Project management
We manage complex, multi-stakeholder website projects from kickoff through launch, including timeline development, milestone tracking, and coordination with CMS vendors. On larger engagements, we’ve managed steering committees and coordinated dozens of department staff responsible for content and accessibility updates.
Training
We equip your staff to maintain an accessible, high-quality website long after our engagement ends. This includes live group training sessions on topics like plain-language writing and accessible content creation, paired with written training materials, cheat sheets, and short guides staff can reference anytime. Our goal is to build real staff ownership over content and accessibility, not just hand off a set of recommendations.
Content migration
We manage the full migration process — auditing existing content, identifying what to keep, consolidate, or retire, and rebuilding pages within a new platform or CMS. Our approach pairs technical migration work with content revision, so that what lands on the new platform is both accurate and easier to navigate. We’re experienced across CivicPlus, Drupal, WordPress, and other common government and nonprofit CMS platforms.
Design and content creation
Navigation
We design navigation that gets users to what they need quickly and without confusion. We work directly within your CMS to implement changes alongside your staff. The result is a site where the most-used services are never more than a click or two away.
Information architecture
We build information architectures from the ground up using real user research, not guesswork. From there, we create a shallow, logically organized structure with plain-language labels that reflects how people actually search for information. We’ve done this at scale — including a 14-department city-wide IA and a full nonprofit site launch — so we know how to make a new structure easy for staff to maintain going forward.
Content design
We design content and page layouts together, so structure and language work as one system. Our process includes wireframing in Figma to map out page hierarchy, visual flow, and where key information sits before a single word is finalized. From there, we write in plain language at accessible reading levels, applying WCAG 2.1 AA standards throughout.
