Chris Adams, Ward 1
Chris AdamsThe Challenge
Chris Adams is running for Councillor in Ward 1 of the Township of Greater Madawaska: Calabogie, Springtown, Hurds Lake and Barrett Chute. He came to us on September 17. Voting opened twenty-six days later.
A campaign has one deadline and it is set by law. This one carried a second job as well. Greater Madawaska runs its election by internet and telephone, with no paper ballots and a PIN that arrives by mail, so a voter who does not understand the process does not cast a ballot at all. The instructions had to carry the same weight as the platform.
The third requirement was independence. Chris needed to publish his own updates between door knocks, from whatever device was to hand, without booking time with a developer to get a post online.
The Approach
We scoped it on the call and built to the date: seven pages covering who he is, what he will work on, the ward itself, how to vote, news and contact.
Static HTML from Astro, published on Cloudflare Pages. No database, no login page facing the internet, nothing that needs patching in the middle of a campaign, and no hosting bill for a candidate spending his own money.
The facts of the race are held as structured data rather than typed into half a dozen pages, so a date, a phone number or a polling location is changed once and corrects itself everywhere it appears. Chris publishes his own posts from a browser; they go live on their own, and the site rebuilds itself each time.
The design decisions follow the audience. Body text is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, the typeface the Braille Institute commissioned for readers with low vision, because Ward 1 is rural and it is not young. An interactive map draws the real ward boundary, since most people cannot say offhand whether their road falls inside it. A thirty-one second video introduces him and his nine priorities, rendered from the site's own design so it carries the same type and colours as every page around it.
The Result
Live at chrisadamsward1.com three days after the first call, on his own domain, with three weeks to spare before voting opened.
The launch itself was routine because it was planned: his own domain with the www address redirecting to it, sitemap and robots serving, a share image, and a deploy and rollback each written down before they were needed.
Work with a fixed public date is the clearest version of what we do. Decide fast, build only what earns its place on the page, and hand over something the client can run without us.