Multi-year WordPress® retainer for a South Carolina political-media firm and its client roster, running from February 2009 through July 2011. The work began in February 2009 with a server migration for the principal’s predecessor consulting practice; when the firm incorporated as Mace Group LLC in 2010, the engagement carried straight over and grew into a standing retainer covering the firm, the principal’s personal site, and several political clients on the firm’s book.
Archived capture (January 2012): view macegroupllc.com on the Wayback Machine.
What I built and ran
- Migrated FITS News, a high-traffic South Carolina political news site, off shared hosting onto Rackspace. WordPress install on the new infrastructure, DNS cutover, post-migration cache work, and ongoing server-incident response.
- Built and maintained sites for the firm and its political clients, including a sitting state legislator later elected to the U.S. Senate, and a sitting U.S. House member at the time of the engagement.
- Shipped on-demand feature work: a custom donation-progress widget, campaign iframe embeds, photo galleries, IE8 cross-browser fixes, video embed compatibility, and category-level AdSense filtering driven by editorial taxonomy.
- Monthly retainer invoicing across the engagement. Same-weekend turnaround was the norm for urgent ad-policy and editorial changes.
The firm
The Mace Group LLC was a South Carolina digital-strategy and political-media firm. The firm’s principal founded it in 2010 and was later elected to public office.
Reference
You rock. Do u think this will suffice the Google adsense gods?
Client, after a same-weekend FITS News fix — June 19, 2011
The engagement also produced active inbound referrals across the South Carolina political-digital network during 2010 and 2011.
One of the campaigns supported under this retainer is documented separately: 2010 U.S. House campaign — South Carolina 1st district (subcontract). Same shape of work as my WordPress development practice today: long-running retainer engagements where same-day turnaround on editorial and platform issues is the contract.
