Launch, Support, and Growth Across Two White House Digital Properties
The White House Historical Association maintains a sprawling library of educational resources across many departments — and, increasingly, across more than one digital property. Each needed a modern, maintainable home without losing the institutional voice and visual heritage the Association is known for.
What began as a single Craft CMS support engagement grew, over four years, into a full partnership — a flagship redesign of whitehousehistory.org, a ground-up build of The People's House museum site, and continuous support across both — each phase building on the trust and shared context of the last.
Two distinct digital properties now share a coherent design language and a stable, well-documented Craft foundation. The Association has a long-term partner who knows its systems, its teams, and its history — and a digital presence built to evolve alongside the organization.
Some of the strongest work an agency does never fits inside a single project. The White House Historical Association is a case in point: what started in 2022 as a focused Craft CMS support engagement has grown, over four years, into a two-property digital partnership — and it is still going.
It started with support
Our first engagement with the Association was unglamorous and essential: keeping whitehousehistory.org healthy. Craft CMS support, maintenance, and the steady stream of enhancements every active site needs. It is the kind of work that earns trust quietly — and it set up everything that followed.
A flagship redesign — whitehousehistory.org
When the Association was ready to rethink its primary site, it was already clear how many teams it takes to make whitehousehistory.org the behemoth of educational resources that it is. Getting those teams involved was a priority. We held one-on-one interviews with each department head using a standardized set of questions, building a network of priorities to cross-reference throughout the project. That kept development streamlined and made sure the entire WHHA team felt ownership of the result.
Stakeholder audits surfaced a deep affinity for the existing design, so we reworked the design system rather than replacing it. We redesigned the content cards — a fundamental piece of how the Association communicates — for clearer pathways through the material, and gave the homepage a parallax treatment that showcases WHHA’s digital asset library. We merged siloed navigation into a single mega menu with guiding descriptions, and rebuilt a limited tagging system so visitors with specific questions could actually find what they needed.
The Association was intent on staying with Craft. Legacy code from a previous vendor — much of it undocumented — added complexity, so we worked closely with WHHA’s IT team to understand it before layering our own work on top. The result was a major CMS upgrade that improved both capability and experience while preserving the familiarity staff depended on.
A second property — The People’s House
With the flagship site established, the partnership expanded to an entirely new property: The People’s House: A White House Experience, a museum where the public explores exhibits modeled on the White House, Rose Garden, and Oval Office.
The defining challenge was bridging the physical and the digital — evoking the museum without flatly replicating it. Each exhibit page draws on one of four colorways taken from real White House wallpapers, tying the digital experience to its physical counterpart. We reframed the exhibit overview as an abstract digital map, sequenced the way a visitor moves through the museum, so the site doubles as a wayfinding tool. Working from a minimal logo and palette, we expanded the brand system with wallpaper patterns and texture so the property could stand on its own.
For efficiency, the team reused components from the broader WHHA site while building a cleaner content structure in Craft, and deliberately built on Craft 4.x for stability rather than chasing the newest release.
Continuous support, across both
Underneath the headline projects, the original work never stopped: ongoing Craft support and enhancements for both properties, year over year. The same quiet, trust-building maintenance the partnership started with — now at twice the footprint.
What’s next — growth
In 2026 the partnership moved into new territory again, with a Digital Archives initiative for whitehousehistory.org. Four years in, the Association has what a one-off project can’t deliver: a partner who knows its CMS, its departments, and its history — and two digital properties built to grow.
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