In 2013, I built the campaign website for a US Senate candidate in South Carolina who, by the time you are reading this, sits in the United States House of Representatives. The candidate was Nancy Mace — first woman to graduate from The Citadel in 1999, author of In the Company of Men (Simon & Schuster, 2001), founder of The Mace Group in Charleston. Her 2013–2014 Republican primary campaign for the US Senate seat then held by Lindsey Graham was the engagement.
That historical weight is the easy part of writing about this project. The interesting part is what we shipped, in what order, and why.
The two-phase build
The campaign needed to announce. The full site was not going to be ready on announcement day. That tension is the most common shape in launch-driven work, and it has exactly one good answer: ship a clean hold page now, build the real thing right, and do not let one decision contaminate the other.
Phase one, July 2013: the hold page. A single-page custom HTML and CSS landing site, deliberately minimal. Clean CSS3 — box-shadow, border-radius, the vendor prefixes the era still required. A Wufoo® form embed at nancymace.wufoo.com for early volunteer signups and contacts while the back end was still being decided. Navy and white palette to set the visual tone the full site would later inherit. The hold page’s only jobs were to be online the day the campaign announced, to capture the names of the people who showed up, and to not look like a placeholder. It did all three.
Phase two, September 2013: the full campaign site. WordPress® 3.6 with a custom Genesis® framework child theme. Issues pages, press releases, blog, store, donations through GiveWorks®, volunteer signups through Mailchimp®, social aggregation pulling Twitter, Facebook®, Flickr®, and YouTube® into the right places. Google Fonts (Oswald) for the masthead. W3 Total Cache® in front of it. Jetpack® on top.
Why Genesis, in 2013
The Genesis framework choice was a specific signal to anyone who had done WordPress work professionally in that era. Page builders as we now know them did not exist. The serious developer choices in 2013 were a hand-rolled custom theme, a Genesis child theme, or a Thesis child theme. Genesis was the framework you reached for when you wanted clean semantic markup, sane hooks and filters, fast page loads, and a codebase the next developer could actually read. For a political campaign — where the next developer might be inheriting the codebase under deadline, mid-news-cycle, with the candidate’s name on the front page — that mattered.
The rest of the stack around the theme was the era-appropriate political-campaign toolkit. GiveWorks handled compliant political donations. Mailchimp ran the list. Wufoo took one-off forms. W3 Total Cache sat in front of it because shared hosting in 2013 needed help under traffic spikes, and Jetpack rode along for the conveniences it bundled. Nothing exotic about any of those choices, and that was the point — a political-campaign codebase that might change hands mid-news-cycle is no place for surprises.
- Platform: WordPress (Genesis framework, custom child theme)
- Period: 2013 (Republican primary ran through June 2014)
- Client: Friends of Nancy Mace, Charleston, South Carolina
- Shape: Two-phase build — hold page July, full site September
Where the two-phase discipline ports
Any project with a hard public date and a longer build underneath has a version of the same problem the campaign had. Political launches. Product reveals. Funding announcements. Merger and acquisition press windows. Conference keynote landing pages. The wrong answer is to compress the real build into the announcement window and ship something that is neither a good hold page nor a finished site. The right answer is two artefacts, both intentional — a hold page that is allowed to be small because it knows what it is, and a real site that is allowed to take the time it needs because the announcement is already handled. The discipline is treating them as two separate deliverables with two separate quality bars, not as draft one and draft two of the same thing.
That discipline is the same in 2026 as it was in 2013. The stack underneath has moved on. The shape of the work has not changed.
