Web design / Washington, DC
Who’s actually reading
In Washington the person on your website often isn’t a customer in the usual sense. It’s a contracting officer with a stack of capability statements open in other tabs, or a membership director deciding whether your conference is worth a line in next year’s budget, or a Hill staffer who needs a lawyer that knows one particular agency and has about four minutes to find one. They aren’t browsing. They’re screening.
That changes what a good site looks like here. Big photography and clever headlines matter less than a page that answers the screening questions before anyone has to email: what you do, for which agencies or sectors, under which certifications, and who picks up the phone. If your set-aside status is part of why people hire you, it belongs in the opening lines, not three clicks down.
Put the capability statement on the site
Most federal contractors already have a one-page capability statement, usually a PDF that gets attached to emails and handed across tables at industry days. Keep it. But that information should also live on the site as a real page, with your NAICS codes, UEI and CAGE code, certifications and core competencies written as text a search engine can read and a contracting officer can copy. A PDF is a poor thing to land on from Google, and it’s miserable on a phone.
This is ordinary web design work, and it rewards restraint. The firms that come across as serious usually have fewer pages, plainer language and an obvious way to request a meeting.
Accessibility isn’t a nice extra here
Federal agencies are bound by Section 508, which points to WCAG 2.0 AA, and plenty of associations and nonprofits in town hold their own sites to the same standard because their members and funders expect it. We design with WCAG 2.1 AA in mind from the first layout, so contrast, focus states, alt text and heading order get settled at the design stage, where fixing them costs almost nothing, rather than patched in after an audit.
Our nonprofit guide covers donation pages and member areas, and most of it applies to the trade associations on K Street as well.
The DMV, all at once
A business here rarely serves just one jurisdiction. A family law practice might take clients in the District and Montgomery County but not across the river in Arlington. A lawn-care company based in Loudoun County probably isn’t driving to Charles County, however the metro map is drawn. People search where they live (Bethesda, Silver Spring, Alexandria, Tysons, Reston), so spell out in plain words which places you cover and, for anyone licensed separately in DC, Maryland and Virginia, which licenses you hold where. Lawyers deal with three separate bars; the law firm guide has notes on putting admissions where clients look for them.
For the neighborhood businesses, the restaurants on 14th Street and the dentists on Capitol Hill, the job is narrower. Show up for the neighborhood name, keep the hours right, and make the phone number easy to tap.
Old sites, new staff
Plenty of DC organizations run websites built a decade ago on platforms nobody currently on staff understands. A website redesign usually fixes more than the look. We rebuild in Framer, so the communications team can publish a statement or update the board list themselves the afternoon it’s needed, without opening a ticket with a developer.
There’s no DC office to visit, and you won’t miss it. We keep Eastern hours, send every design round as a link your comms director can check between Hill meetings, and spend the launch session training staff on the editor.
Asked around the Beltway
Does whoever builds our site need a security clearance?
Not for a public website. Everything on it is meant to be public, and we don’t need access to anything else. If the site has to connect to internal systems, that connection should stay with your own IT people, and we’ll design around whatever they decide.
Can our staff post a statement the same day a bill moves?
Yes. Anyone you give an editor login can publish a new page or news post from a browser, and the layouts are set up in advance so a rushed statement still looks like it belongs.