Web design and ASP development for an Ottawa-based hemispheric policy think tank: my first freelance engagement after Corel, and a site that ran nine years on the original build.
The Canadian Foundation for the Americas was an independent Ottawa-based foreign policy centre focused on hemispheric relations, Canada–Latin America diplomacy, the Organization of American States, and democratic governance in the Americas. FOCAL was my first freelance contract after leaving Corel Corporation in 2001. Corel was a large commercial software company with structured teams and dedicated infrastructure. FOCAL was the opposite: a small, policy-driven organization operating on a research budget, not a corporate one.
The think tank web problem
Think tanks have a different web problem than news sites and corporate sites. A news organization pushes new content constantly. A corporation wants a polished, controlled message. FOCAL needed to surface a growing library of policy publications, maintain an ongoing events calendar, and hold positions on a shifting diplomatic agenda, all updated by staff who were policy analysts, not web developers. The site had to be easy to maintain by non-technical people, organized enough to serve academics and journalists doing research, and stable enough to outlast the next platform trend.
FOCAL’s audience was specific: policymakers, academic researchers, diplomats, journalists, and NGO staff tracking Canadian positions on Latin American affairs. They came to the site for source material: research papers, policy briefs, conference proceedings, event announcements, and the Foundation’s own positions on current issues. That readership needed a site organized for research, not for casual browsing.
The build
The content architecture organized around three primary surfaces: a publications library, an events calendar, and policy-position pages, with staff profiles and organizational history underneath. Publications were the core. FOCAL produced research papers, policy briefs, and conference proceedings for readers who cited them in academic and government work. Each piece needed enough metadata to be findable by topic, author, date, and region. The events calendar covered a regular program of roundtables, speaker series, and conferences on hemispheric policy. Policy positions evolved as the diplomatic landscape shifted; the architecture had to accommodate revision without breaking the existing structure.
The build was ASP on Windows/IIS, the standard stack for policy and government-adjacent organizations in Ottawa in 2002. Most of the federal departments and affiliated organizations FOCAL worked with ran the same infrastructure. Matching that stack meant no specialized hosting requirement and no dependency the organization could not support with ordinary Windows-platform hosting over time. The decision was practical: use what the organization’s environment already knew how to run.
CubaSource
The FOCAL engagement came with a second deliverable: CubaSource, the Foundation’s dedicated Cuba research directory for policy researchers, journalists, and academics tracking Cuba’s political and economic landscape. CubaSource was bilingual English and Spanish, with its own low-bandwidth design constraints, built and delivered on the same timeline as the main FOCAL site. The CubaSource entry covers that build separately.
Nine years on the original build
The FOCAL site ran from 2002 until the Foundation closed permanently in 2011: nine years without a rebuild. That durability came from getting the architecture right on the first pass. A publications library and events calendar built to grow does not need to be replaced if the structure can absorb new content without modification. FOCAL’s did. Staff added publications and events through a back-end form for the full life of the organization, without requiring a developer for routine updates.
A dedicated portfolio screenshot was live on thisismyurl.com through at least March 2005, confirmed by the Wayback Machine.
- Platform: ASP/Windows/IIS
- Architecture: Publications library, events calendar, policy-position pages, staff profiles
- Client: Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL)
- Period: 2001–2002 (site active through FOCAL’s closure in 2011)