What every site has to do.
Load fast
Measured on a mid-range phone over a slow connection rather than on a desk. That is where a slow page actually costs somebody, and no amount of design recovers a visitor who has already left.
Work on any screen
Laid out for the device it is on, from a narrow phone to a wide desktop, and checked on real handsets rather than by dragging a browser window narrower.
Be publishable
An editor should be able to make a change without asking us, and without being able to break the layout doing it.
Be accessible
Keyboard navigation, color contrast, alternative text and a heading order that makes sense, held to WCAG 2.2 Level AA and reviewed by a person for what a checker cannot see.
Be findable
Structured data, clean markup, a sitemap that matches what exists, and metadata that always agrees with the page it describes.
Be secure
Current software, a tight dependency list, and audits by people who do this for a living. A compromised site costs more than it ever cost to build.
Say something
Content organized for the audience, in plain language.
A page added in year four should look like one added in year one.
Built around what you actually publish.
An out-of-the-box content manager gives every organization the same fields. Very few organizations publish the same things.
So the administration is built around the content that exists: a service, a case study, a location, a person, a rate, whatever the organization produces and has to keep current. Each becomes a structured type with named fields, and an editor fills those in rather than assembling a page out of parts.
That one decision removes most of what makes a site rot. Layout cannot drift, because the template owns it. Accessibility rules cannot be missed, because they are enforced where the content is entered. A page added in year four looks like a page added in year one, without anybody having to police it.
The plugin list stays short and vetted. Every addition is a dependency, an attack surface, and a thing that can stop being maintained; a site carrying forty of them is carrying forty separate risks. We use a small set we have run across hundreds of launches, all open-source and none under a restrictive license, so another team can pick the project up later without buying anything first.
Marketing tooling is part of the same system rather than four more subscriptions: privacy and cookie controls, content and search audits, structured data, social metadata, newsletter integrations and campaign tracking. One place to look, one set of permissions, one thing to keep current.
