We’ve been building websites since 1998, and for most of that time a good share of the work has been for the public sector. Devon County Council, Cornwall Council, the Duchy of Cornwall, the Met Office, Active Devon, Active Cornwall — over the years the logos change, but the discipline the work demands has only deepened. Here’s what a quarter-century of council projects has taught us.
What’s changed
Accessibility went from a nice-to-have to a legal duty, and rightly so. Public-sector sites now have to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and meeting it properly — not with a bolt-on overlay — shapes how a site is designed from the first wireframe. Performance became a ranking and usability factor rather than an afterthought. And procurement grew more structured: frameworks, tenders, clear evidence requirements. An agency that can’t speak that language doesn’t get far.
What hasn’t
The hard part was never the web. It’s the governance around it. A council site usually answers to several teams, each with a stake and a sign-off, and often to partner organisations on top. Building something that stays coherent through that — that doesn’t turn into a compromise nobody likes — is the real skill. So is building for a content lifecycle measured in years, edited by non-technical staff, on a budget that has to justify itself. That’s been constant since 1998.
Current, not historical
It would be easy to treat public-sector credentials as an old line on a CV. Ours aren’t. Recent builds like the Smokefree Devon Alliance site for Devon County Council, and the National Partnership for Ocean Prediction site for a six-institution research consortium, are today’s work to today’s standards — accessible, fast, and built to be run by the teams who own them.
Anyone can claim public-sector experience. The test is whether the last council site you built would pass an accessibility audit today.
If you’re commissioning a public-sector or partnership website and want a team that has done it for twenty-five years, let’s talk.