Case study · Website rescue

Rancho Los Cerritos

A 200-year-old Long Beach landmark was left with a half-finished website and a developer who’d gone quiet. We picked up the handoff, refreshed the design into something worthy of the place, and built a platform their team could actually run — fast, flexible, and built to show off the archives and events at its heart.

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Nonprofit · Historic siteliving history museum & gardens, Long Beach CA
WordPress · Bricksdesign refresh + role-based editor access
Content PermissionsDesign RefreshPerformanceWebsite Rescue
The historic Rancho Los Cerritos adobe building and gardens

The setup

Rancho Los Cerritos is one of Long Beach’s oldest landmarks — a living-history museum and garden where the Tongva, Spanish-era settlers, and American pioneers all left their mark. Behind the public face of tours, exhibits, and weddings on the grounds sits a small, dedicated team and a deep archive that deserves to be seen.

They’d started a website project with another developer — and it stalled. The build was half-done, the developer had gone quiet, and the team was left holding an unfinished site with no clear way forward. They needed someone to take the handoff, make sense of what existed, and actually carry it across the line.

That’s where we came in. We assessed what was salvageable, mapped what was missing, and committed to seeing the whole thing through — not just shipping a homepage and walking away.

The challenge

A stalled rebuild, an absent developer, and a team that needed to run the site themselves once we were done.

  • Finish what was started. Take over a half-built site mid-stream, without scrapping the work worth keeping.
  • Make it editable. A small nonprofit team can’t call a developer every time a date changes — they needed to manage their own content with confidence.
  • Lock down the right edges. Specific content and sections needed controlled access, so the right people could edit the right things — and nothing else.
  • Do justice to the place. A 200-year-old landmark deserves a site that feels as considered as the grounds themselves.

The solution

Refresh the design, hand the team the keys, and build a platform that actually keeps up.

  • A fresh, modern-rustic design. A refresh that matches the warmth and history of the grounds — earthy, contemporary, and built to put the archives and events front and center.
  • An editor-friendly build. Built on WordPress and Bricks so the team can update events, exhibits, and pages themselves — no developer required for day-to-day changes.
  • Fine-grained access controls. Role-based permissions so specific users can edit specific content and nothing they shouldn’t — polished editorial control instead of all-or-nothing access.
  • A performant platform. Rebuilt on high-performance managed hosting with a global CDN — fast page loads that show off the collection and event calendar beautifully, even under traffic.
The results

Picked it up. Carried it through.

Shipped

a stalled, half-built project taken over and delivered live.

Self-serve

the team manages events, exhibits, and content without a developer in the loop.

Per-section access

granular permissions so the right people edit the right things.

Still here

an ongoing collaboration, not a launch-and-leave.

A site the team runs themselves

Updating an exhibit, posting an event, refreshing a page — it all happens in-house now, with access controls that let staff and volunteers manage their own corners safely. The site keeps pace with the programming instead of trailing behind it.

A partner that stuck around

Rescues get messy, and this one had its share of hard stretches. We stayed through them — and we’re still in their corner, helping the platform grow as the museum does. The refresh wasn’t the finish line; it was the start of the working relationship.

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Your turn

Inherited a half-built site?

We took Rancho Los Cerritos from a stalled handoff to a platform their team runs themselves. If a project stalled out on you, let’s get it across the line.

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