Editors publishing without a developer, for the first time in nine years

Thornbury Trust support adults leaving long-term care. Their website ran on a bespoke CMS built nine years earlier by a developer who had long since moved on. Every content change went through an agency at an hourly rate, which in practice meant most changes did not happen.

The accessibility position was the more serious problem. As a charity delivering services under public-sector contracts they had obligations they were not meeting, and no way to demonstrate otherwise.

What we did

The content audit came first, and it removed more than it kept: of roughly 1,900 pages, 660 were duplicates, superseded or had not been viewed in two years. Migrating them would have cost money and made the site worse.

We modelled document types and block lists so that editors can compose pages from approved components without being able to break the design system. That constraint is the whole point — an editor experience that permits anything produces a site nobody can maintain.

The front end was built to WCAG 2.2 AA as a delivery standard rather than a retrofit, with an independent audit before launch rather than after it.

Migration covered 1,240 pages, the media library and — the part that protects search ranking — a complete redirect map from the old URL structure.

The outcome

Thornbury’s communications team publish directly. In the first three months after launch they made 380 content changes, none of which involved us or an agency.

The accessibility audit passed at WCAG 2.2 AA before launch, and the report is something they can hand to a commissioner.

Organic search traffic held through the migration, which is what the redirect map was for. It is the least visible part of the work and the one most likely to be skipped.