Four years, one website

Our client is the community organization behind a corporate innovation methodology — the kind of structured programme large companies run to get ideas out of their own employees and into production. The method itself started inside a very large software company and was later extended by a European spin-out. It has been adopted at thousands of organizations: multinationals, universities, government agencies and non-profits.

The Foundation’s purpose is to give the material away. Open-source toolkits, a handbook, case studies, events and video interviews, free to anyone who wants to run an innovation programme of their own. Our job was to build somewhere for all of it to live.

We launched the site in July 2022. We are still working on it today.

That second sentence is the whole case study. Most agency relationships have a shape — a build, a handover, a final invoice, then silence until something breaks badly enough to warrant a phone call. This one never had a handover, because it never finished. The site went live in July 2022, the DNS cut over that October, and the requests simply never stopped arriving: a mobile layout fix that month, a mailing-list integration that December, new sections in 2024, an email routing question in 2025.

None of that was a retainer. It was four years of a client who knew they could ask. That is a quieter arrangement than a maintenance contract, and in practice it is what most organizations actually need from a long-term WordPress partner.

That morning: seven minutes. At 10:25 the site was restored from an earlier version and back online. Then the more useful part — we asked what she had actually been trying to achieve, and showed her how to duplicate a page without installing anything at all. The plugin was never the right tool. Nobody had told her that, because nobody had been asked.

That restore worked because it had been done before. An untested backup is a belief rather than a safeguard, and the WordPress documentation on backing up your database and files is blunt about the difference.

The original build. The site runs on WordPress with a custom lightweight theme, built so the Foundation could keep adding to it without coming back to us for every change. Events, case studies and video interviews each run on their own content type, so publishing means filling in a form rather than briefing a developer. Material downloads run through gated forms, so the Foundation captures who is requesting what. Layouts are template-driven, so a section can be rearranged in-house without a deployment.

The four years since. New sections as the methodology evolved — including a full AI-assisted version that arrived years after launch, built on the same foundation as everything else. A mailing-list integration. Mobile layout corrections. Email routing questions.

And the work nobody asks for, because nobody knows to ask:

Technical SEO cleanup. In August 2026 we found three pages sitting on malformed URLs — duplicate-slug residue left behind by that same June 2024 incident. WordPress had appended numeric suffixes to avoid a collision, and one page’s address ended up describing a completely different topic than its content. We renamed all of them to match their titles and put 301 redirects behind them, so four years of accumulated links kept working.

Content hygiene. Two director biographies had been sitting as placeholder Lorem Ipsum under the names of two real and well-known people. We wrote and shipped replacements.

Small rot. A hardcoded copyright year that had gone stale. Replaced with a shortcode so it cannot go stale again.

That last cluster is the part worth attention. Two years after a page got broken and fixed in seven minutes, the residue of that incident was still sitting in the site’s URLs, quietly splitting its search authority. Nobody at the Foundation could have spotted it — it produced no error, no alert and no complaint. That is the actual job of a long-term WordPress partner: not being on call, but noticing.