Portfolio
DC Housing Authority
Website design and rebuild for the District of Columbia Housing Authority, moved off a retiring legacy server.
LaunchedOctober 2026
BuiltOur design and a custom WordPress theme, with audience-based navigation, a property finder and a resources library
MigratedLegacy pages, vanity links and documents, mapped into 363 redirect rules
The Problem
A housing authority’s website was sitting on a server about to be retired, with years of links that residents, landlords and partners still depended on.
Objectives
Give residents, applicants, landlords and business partners each a clear path to programs, forms and contacts.
Move pages, news and documents off the retiring server without breaking a single link in circulation.
Let agency staff update content, board meetings and documents themselves.
Challenge
DCHA provides affordable housing to extremely low- through moderate-income households across the District. Its site serves public housing residents, voucher participants, applicants, landlords and business partners, and most of what they need lives in forms, guides and board documents.
The legacy site ran on an older Windows server that was going away. Years of page addresses, short vanity links and document URLs were printed on notices, in emails and on partner sites. If those stopped working, people lost access to help. That’s a higher bar than most marketing sites ever have to clear.
Strategic Approach
We organized the site by who’s asking, not by which department answers. Applicants, Residents, Landlords, Business Partners and About, each with its own path to the right programs, forms and contacts. Then we built the tools that do the real work: a filterable Properties List with a map, a Resources finder that sorts forms and guides by audience and topic, customer service center details and FAQs.
Board and solicitation documents used to sit in embedded SharePoint folders, and each new meeting meant staff updating links by hand on several pages. We replaced that with a document management system built into the site. Staff upload a file and its details once. The site names the file consistently, adds it to filterable, searchable document tables, and shows the next board meeting wherever it appears, including the menu, the About pages and the Speaker Request Form.
For the migration we treated every URL as a promise. We mapped legacy pages, vanity links and high-demand documents into 363 redirect rules on WP Engine, and restored the Resources documents that turned up missing at launch.
What we delivered
- Site design and a custom WordPress theme organized by audience
- Filterable Properties List with map
- Resources finder by audience and topic
- Customer service center, FAQ and Board of Commissioners sections
- Document management system for board meetings and solicitations, with staff uploads, automatic file naming and filterable public document tables
- Full content and document migration off the legacy server
- 363 redirect rules on WP Engine covering pages, vanity links and documents
- Post-launch document restoration and fixes
- Transition to ongoing maintenance and support
Built around who is asking
Applicants, residents, landlords and business partners each get their own path.
ApplicantsResidentsLandlordsBusiness PartnersResourcesNewsroom
Outcome
The new site launched on www.dchousing.org in October 2026 with 363 redirects carrying the old addresses forward, so the links people already had still work. Board meeting and solicitation documents moved off SharePoint into a system DCHA staff manage from one dashboard.
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