Government, on a content system you own outright.
A content management system configured for public sector work, on a foundation of enterprise-grade security and documented technical controls.
It runs at every level of a municipal or regional government: city and county administrations, regional tourism organizations, and federal agencies.
Nothing about it is bespoke to the point of being unmaintainable. A developer who has worked with the underlying system can work on this, which matters on a ten-year public procurement more than it does anywhere else.
Bought once. Lived with for a decade.
For agencies
Natural content associations
A hierarchy of content relations that surfaces relevant pages to a visitor without a navigation menu having to carry them. An agency with a large and complicated content structure gets the most out of it.
Indexed search
Results appear under the search bar as they are typed, ranked by an index built on top of the standard content search. Nobody is sent to a results page to find out their query missed.
Role-based administration
User groups, publishing workflows and access to submitted form data, each controlled separately. An editor sees the part of the system they work in and nothing else.
Structured content
Complex layouts become custom fields an editor fills in, with accessibility and layout rules enforced by the template rather than by the person typing.
Audit trails
Automated reports on site security, and a record of every user, administrator action and content edit. Public bodies are asked for this and it is difficult to produce afterwards.
Analytics and marketing
Reports in the administration dashboard, from Google Analytics or from a privacy-compliant alternative that is built in. Newsletter providers, campaign tools and conversion tracking connect to the same place.
A visitor should not have to learn your org chart.
Public sector content is organized the way the organization is organized, and a resident looking for a service does not know how the organization is organized.
An editor flags a page by topic or by the service it belongs to, which takes a few seconds. From then on that page appears in navigation and in search, and is surfaced alongside related content, as a featured block and in slide-in notices, chosen by relevance and by the path the visitor took to get there.
Search is indexed on top of the standard content search, so results are ranked rather than listed. A search that returns the wrong thing twice is a search nobody uses again, and the fallback is a phone call to a department that did not need one.
For public bodies is actually buying.
A government website is bought once and lived with for a decade, by people who did not choose it and cannot replace it.
That changes what matters. A feature saving an editor two minutes is worth more than one that impresses a committee, because the editor will use it four hundred times a year and the committee will see the site twice. Everything here is built for the first audience: the communications officer, the clerk publishing an agenda, the department administrator updating a service page the week before a deadline.
It also changes what counts as risk. The system underneath is one that thousands of developers already know, so the agency is not tied to us: a successor can be handed the codebase and be productive in a week. Security patches come from a maintained upstream rather than from a vendor who may or may not still be trading in year seven.
Accessibility is a legal requirement for a public body, and the template enforces it. An editor filling in a structured field cannot produce a heading out of order, an image without alternative text, or a color pairing that fails contrast, because those decisions were made once in the design and are no longer available to get wrong.
Records requests, audit trails and retention are the part nobody asks to see in a demonstration and everybody eventually needs. Every administrator action and content edit is recorded, every user is listed with what they can reach, and the reports come out of the system rather than out of somebody reconstructing a year afterwards.
