National Coast Guard Museum
Quiet, reliable hosting and care for the museum site, so the team can stay focused on telling the story of the Coast Guard.
- Engaged
- August 2023
- Relationship
- Ongoing
- Platform
- WordPress
- Sector
- Nonprofit
The Brief
A site that needed to stay up and stay current, without a team to watch it.
The National Coast Guard Museum is being built in New London, Connecticut, and the website carries the story in the meantime. The site introduces the museum, shares its mission, and keeps supporters current on progress. What the team needed was not a rebuild. It was someone to keep the site online, keep WordPress current, and keep an eye on how people were finding it. The kind of work that is easy to put off until the week it becomes a problem.
The Solution
We took the keys and made the upkeep our problem, not theirs.
Materiell moved the site into a secure cloud environment we manage, set WordPress and its plugins on a regular patching cadence, and added monitoring so we hear about an issue before a visitor does. A few times a year we sit down with the team, walk through their analytics together, and share what the numbers are telling us. No surprise invoices, no chasing a developer who moved on. The same people care for the site month after month.
Managed infrastructure
Hosted in a secure cloud environment
The site lives in a hardened cloud environment Materiell manages end to end. Daily backups, encrypted storage, locked-down access, and uptime monitoring that pages us, not the museum. We handle the server so the team never has to think about where the site lives or who is watching it. When something upstream shifts, a provider change, a traffic spike around an announcement, we are already on it.
Managed WordPress updates
WordPress stays current, on a schedule, without a fire drill.
WordPress and its plugins need steady attention, and the cost of skipping it shows up as a security hole or a broken page at the worst possible moment. We patch core and plugins on a regular cadence, test updates before they reach the live site, and roll back cleanly if anything looks off. The museum gets a site that stays current and stays whole.
Digital strategy
We read the analytics with them, and tell them what it means.
A dashboard nobody opens is not strategy. A few times a year we review the site analytics alongside the museum team, talk through what is drawing people in and where they drop off, and translate the numbers into a short list of things worth doing next. Plain insights the team can act on, not a report that gets filed and forgotten.
Stewardship
The same team, year after year.
This is the quiet kind of work that rarely makes a case study, and it is most of what keeps a site healthy. We have cared for the museum site since 2023, and we still do. Most months the team barely hears from us. That is the point. The site is up, current, and looked after, so they can keep their attention on the museum itself.
Figures
99.99%
Uptime
Measured across the engagement, with monitoring that alerts us first.
24/7
Monitoring
The site is watched around the clock, so issues surface to us fast.
2023
Caring for it since
A multi-year relationship that is still going.
Tech Stack
What it runs on.
A WordPress site hosted in a secure cloud environment Materiell manages, kept current through regular patching and reviewed with the team through their analytics.
Next Project
National Industry for the Blind
What began as a single website rebuild grew into a multi-year relationship spanning several sites, built for the nation's largest employer of people who are blind.
Let's Talk