A research organisation that can publish without a developer

The problem

The client is a policy research and public-education firm in Pune. Its website was an ageing WordPress build that no longer looked like the organisation and could not support the way it wanted to publish.

The friction

Publishing meant asking someone technical. The research output — papers, recordings, written pieces — had no structure on the site that matched how the organisation actually thought about its own work. And the brand the organisation used everywhere else stopped at the website.

The system

A custom-built site carrying the organisation's own brand system, with a structure that follows its research wings rather than a generic template. Publications hold the real papers. There is a gallery, a podcast and a blog, each treated as a proper part of the site rather than a bolt-on.

The direction of travel matters more than any one page. The platform is moving toward self-managed publishing — a headless content system, subscriber emails when something is published, and analytics — so the organisation can run its own content without a developer standing behind it.

The workflow

The new site is live. Domain cutover and the content-management phase are in progress, and the platform continues to be extended in rounds rather than handed over once and left.

What we learned

A research organisation wants what a newsletter platform offers — write, publish, notify subscribers — without handing its identity to that platform. Building the capability inside their own branded site gives them both.

Replacing a website is rarely a website problem. The reason the old site could not be updated was that publishing had a person in the middle of it, and that is a process question before it is a technical one.