The RDCK covers 23,153 square kilometres of mountain country in southeastern British Columbia, from Nelson and Creston out to Nakusp. It runs about 200 active services from 105 locations for a little over 62,000 residents. All of that has to live somewhere public.

The website they had could not carry it. Their old CMS gave the team rich text fields and forms to fill in, and almost nothing else. No accordions, no tables, no cards, nothing staff could assemble on their own. Anything past typing a paragraph meant filing a request and waiting on a developer. At this size that stops being an inconvenience and starts being a bottleneck on public information.

So they came to us with a clear ask: move us to WordPress, and give us a way to actually manage our own site.

WordPress was the platform they asked for. What we handed over sits closer to a small system than a theme:

• A library of about thirty editor blocks, so staff assemble pages from the same kit we designed the site with
• A careers system with a sortable, filterable job table that the HR team runs in-house instead of renting a job board
• A bylaws and policies library of nearly 150 documents, filtered live in the browser by keyword, category and letter
• A bids and tenders listing that flips itself to closed when the deadline passes
• Emergency alert banners with priority levels, publishable in about a minute from one settings screen
• An events system on The Events Calendar with custom templates, filtering and calendar views
• A members-only resource area for board directors, gated by real authenticated accounts

The RDCK kept their crest and their blue. Everything else came from us: the palette logic, the type scale, the card and button treatments, the oversized headings, the rounded blue chrome, and the mountain motifs that quietly tie the whole thing back to the Kootenays.

The part we are fondest of is the department colour system. Each department carries its own accent, and a page works out which one to wear from where it sits in the page tree. Staff never choose a hex code. They move a page and the colour, the sidebar and the breadcrumbs all follow it.

The main site is one of two things we have built with the RDCK. The other is RDCK Engage, their public engagement platform, which they had been renting at enterprise prices until we rebuilt it as a lean WordPress application they own outright. Read the RDCK Engage case study for that side of the work.