Iwaiwa

The digital side of Ngā Māia's rebrand to Iwaiwa. The organisation asked me to move all of its digital systems to the new brand: the website, the workspace and professional email, the members area, the e-learning platform, and the domain name, with everything redirecting correctly and continuing to work as normal after the change.

The same job the Ngā Māia platform did, under the new brand: a public website with news and updates, a members area, an e-learning platform, and e-commerce for selling courses and merchandise.

The extra complexity is that this wasn't a fresh site. Every digital system had to move from ngamaiatrust.org to iwaiwa.org.nz, but ngamaiatrust.org still had to keep working as normal while iwaiwa.org.nz carried the new brand. Both had to work side by side through the change.

I handled the whole build. A design agency developed the branding guidelines and provided the digital assets, fonts, colour schemes, and a basic template of page layouts and look. I worked with the agency to turn that into a custom build, and went back and forth with Ngā Māia until the site was to their liking. The result has a much more earthy feel than the Ngā Māia website, which was more clinical.

From that starting point, a lot of the design is my own, made with AI assistance, often where the organisation wasn't happy with what they had. I added the English and Māori language toggle for the navigation and page titles, wrote content that wasn't in the designs, and added missing pages, including the legal pages. I designed and built the whole members area. I turned the regions page, which followed the old Ngā Māia layout, into an interactive map: hover over a region, click it, and a pop-up shows its details. I redesigned the Tūranga Kaupapa course page, which on the old site had a separate button for each product, so people can pick their product and register in one clear flow. I also redesigned login, which on the old site was a single button with wrapping text, so people go to one login and then choose the members area or the e-learning course.

Alongside the custom build, I handled the redirects from ngamaiatrust.org, the workspace and its professional email, the migration of email and files, the workspace folder structure, and doing all of it securely without anything breaking.

The website is a custom build rather than a website-builder site, written with an AI agent and hosted on Netlify. The members area, the e-learning platform, and the Stripe checkout stay on Builderall, the platform Ngā Māia already used, so the rebrand didn't mean moving those systems too.

The build happened in an AI-native workspace: an AI-agnostic workspace, not tied to one AI tool, that holds full context on the project and the organisation, along with the organisation's assets, branding guidelines, and designs. With that in place, the AI agent was working from the same information I was.

The design came first. I took the branding guidelines and designs from the design agency and designed the website from them for the organisation's approval.

Once the design was approved, I built the site in phases, going back and forth with an AI agent inside the AI-native workspace. Each phase followed standard software development practices.

The rebrand work ran alongside the build: setting up the redirects from ngamaiatrust.org, moving the workspace and professional email to the new brand, and migrating email and files.

The website was built with AI, inside a workspace I set up so the agent worked from the organisation's real context, assets, and guidelines rather than guesses.

Accounts are protected with two-factor authentication, and credentials were shared and managed through secure credential management rather than in plain text.

Payments go through Stripe, hosted on the Builderall platform, so card details are handled by Stripe and are never stored on the website. Keeping payments on Builderall also meant the rebrand didn't move them to a new platform.

The biggest limitation was time. Everything, from design through to the rebranded systems, was done within two weeks. It was a real time crunch, and the organisation handled it well.

The rebrand also couldn't interrupt anything. ngamaiatrust.org had to keep working as normal while iwaiwa.org.nz took on the new brand, so redirects, email, files, and the workspace all had to move without breaking what members and staff already relied on.

One result was keeping the platform on Builderall. The organisation was considering a move to Squarespace, but that would have meant migrating every current member, every email-list subscriber, and every student who had already paid for a course. Staying on Builderall avoided that migration entirely.

I would make the proposal visual, not just written. I now keep a before-and-after view: screenshots of where everything currently is, covering the main website, the members area, the student portal, and the Tūranga Kaupapa course, next to the proposed design changes. Showing that early would have got approvals sooner and given the organisation a clearer picture of how the transition would work. The team are trained midwives, not technical staff, and things often needed explaining several times; a visual would have been far more efficient than going back and forth trying to describe the process.

I would also work with the design agency to get website designs much sooner. Their designs arrived with about a week left, which left one week to build everything. It worked out, but it was a tight squeeze.