How to build a 6,000 page website without time or money

I picture other organisations having routine meetings to discuss the functionality, design, responsiveness and brand alignment of their websites. Out of these meetings probably come detailed and well-conceived plans to roll-out changes and upgrades. Of course there may be a few delays and bumps along the way, but a coordinated effort would deliver the project with fanfare and applause for a job well done. This is not that story. 

In February 2021, I was working in a heightened state of panic as we all hid indoors and followed guidance on exercise and social contact. ECGI had recruited four new part-time team members and training was underway. Core activities had shifted online so the ECGI website was experiencing more traffic than ever before. The legendary 24-hour webinar in April 2020 brought in thousands of new subscribers from around the world and we were no longer catering solely to our membership base.

In the midst of this, an email arrived from our website contractors asking for an urgent meeting. They wanted to break the news that the platform that ECGI was using (Drupal 7) would no longer be supported after November 2021. I heard this as, “we need a new website in 9 months”. We had no budget for such a big project. I nearly cried but being Irish, I opted for a cup of tea instead. Then I called Marco. Not long after that, we had the support of the ECGI Board to use some of the carefully squirrelled reserve funds to pay for a new website project. In the absence of an IT team or any expertise, I called my cousin who worked in IT and convinced him to work freelance for a few hours each month alongside his full-time job, to help me draw up a brief and send it out to tender. I learned a lot from the 2017 development of the ECGI website, the most important thing being how deceptively large and unwieldy it is. With over 6,000 pages, it has many variations of inter-connected content and different user categories depending on appointments and membership designations. A pre-designed and cost-effective website template off the shelf, which serves well for so many small businesses, was unfortunately not on the cards.

The website project became my part-time hobby. Over the course of a few months we engaged with 19 website development companies in the discovery period, holding online meetings to explain ECGI’s objectives and project parameters. We learned that the November 2021 deadline was extended to November 2022, and that beyond this date nothing catastrophic was likely to happen. This allowed us to slow things down considerably and focus on ECGI’s many other initiatives. 

By January 2022, we had teamed up with Annertech, a leading website agency in Ireland, specialising in websites for non-profit organisations. It proved to be a delightful collaboration and over the next two years we were able to work slowly and steadily to build out the structure and features of the website. However, the downside of working on a project like this at a snail’s pace, is that you need to maintain a creaky sprawling website at the same time. This means hosting two enormous websites. I regularly received alerts informing me that the old website had “reached capacity” on the server and that we needed to delete some content in order for it to continue at normal speed. It was akin to the engineer on a ship exclaiming that it was “about to blow”! I came to dread these alerts. Towards the end, I began ignoring them, hoping that nothing would explode in the last few days before the new site took over the reins. We took the old website right up to its breaking point.

Apart from the technological impetus to build a new website, we had many good reasons to embark on this project. When ECGI was established, it had a small cohort of members who shared their papers and occasional announcements on the website. The internet was in its infancy, websites were rudimentary, and corporate governance as a field of study was a lot narrower than it is today. By the standards of the time, the ECGI website was pretty impressive, incorporating a member database and a connected invoicing system. But by 2016, ECGI had over 600 members, websites were far more sophisticated, and corporate governance was broadening to include investor stewardship and many related topics. A new website in 2017 transformed ECGI’s operations and our ability to publish faster and share news about our research members’ events and activities around the world. More and more people began using ECGI research and attending conferences. The subsequent evolution of ESG as an aspect of corporate governance research and the pressing urgency of social and environmental change led increased volumes of people of all backgrounds towards ECGI’s legal and financial studies on governance, ESG and stewardship. By the time that we received the call from our website developers in February 2021, with now more than 8,500 subscribers and 4,000 monthly website users, it had become time to improve once more how ECGI provides access to its vast resources.

We aimed to deliver a website built around three foundational truths: ECGI is a global network. It is a public good. It is committed to improving corporate governance.

The 2024 website is now live at www.ecgi.global. We will continue to tweak and add to it over the coming weeks but we also welcome your feedback. We invite you to visit the website and take a moment to review your profile for any updates that you may wish to make. Members can do this by logging in and utilising the “Edit” button at the top left of their profile page on arrival. We are standing by to help if needed at: membership@ecgi.org.

Thank you for joining us on this journey and we hope that the website will facilitate easier access to the latest research for many years to come!

Elaine McPartlan, ECGI General Manager

Click here to provide Feedback.