Work · 09

California Secretary of State: a public site, kept steady and current

1 call

turned into years of partnership

A state agency’s public front door, in good hands. The California Secretary of State runs sos.ca.gov on Concrete CMS, managed by PortlandLabs.

• Fully managed: hosting, security and every Concrete upgrade
• Simpler, high-availability AWS architecture
• Built to WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility

Help first. Business second.

• The call: No prior relationship, but the site was going down and people needed it. We answered and got it back online.
• The fix: We left it better than we found it, didn’t charge a dime and offered to keep helping.
• The rebuild: Fast forward a few months: we’d upgraded Concrete, redesigned the site and trained their developers to work in it safely.
• The intranet: They handed us their old intranet next. We redesigned it, moved the content over and handed it back.

Their developers do the work. We guide the way. The Secretary of State’s developers have their own Git repo and build their own blocks. When they’re stuck, they file a ticket and we show them how, sometimes pairing on the code. Because we built Concrete, platform upgrades land without undoing their work.