Ngā Māia

A complete digital setup for Ngā Māia, an organisation that started with no online or digital presence and no shared workspace.

Gives the organisation professional email and a shared workspace for documents, spreadsheets, and video meetings; a public website; a members area where people register, reach private content, and join a mailing list; and an e-learning platform connected to the main site.

I did the work from planning and architecture through to development. I planned the website and the workspace, gave the organisation a choice between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and set up Google Workspace once they chose it. I then designed and built the website, the members area, and the e-learning platform.

The website is built with Builderall, a hosted website builder. The full build covers the public website, a members area, an e-learning platform for the Tūranga Kaupapa education programme, email marketing connected to the website, and e-commerce: merchandise is sold through the site, and so is the course itself.

For the organisation's day-to-day work, I set up Google Workspace to handle professional email, documents and productivity, and team collaboration.

The work started with winning the contract. I scoped what the organisation needed, wrote a proposal, and refined it with them until it was accepted.

Delivery then moved through a set of phases: discovery, to understand the organisation, its members, and how they work; planning, covering the site structure, the workspace, and the platform choices; design, followed by a design review with the organisation; the build-out of the website, members area, e-learning platform, and workspace; and finally handover, so the organisation could run the platform themselves.

Every Google Workspace account was required to use 2-step verification, so a leaked password alone isn't enough to get into the organisation's email or documents.

Payments for merchandise and the course go through Stripe, so card details are handled by Stripe and are never stored on the website.

At handover, ownership of the Builderall and Google Workspace accounts went to Ngā Māia, and I removed my own admin access. The organisation controls its own platform and data, with no leftover outside access.

No AI tools were used in this project.

Budget was the main constraint. Ngā Māia is a non-profit, and the goal was the best result for the least money. At the time, the Builderall basic plan cost about NZ$30 to NZ$50 a month, which fit their budget. Google Workspace, at about NZ$12.60 per user per month, was itself a real consideration for them. Those costs shaped what we could and couldn't do.

The organisation also wanted to look after the website themselves, with one of their own people making updates and small changes instead of paying an outside developer for each one. That is why it is built on a website builder rather than a custom codebase.

The people using it are trained midwives, not technical staff, so everything had to be as simple as possible to understand and operate. That limited how complex the platform could be.

Within those limits, the platform delivered. The Tūranga Kaupapa programme, sold through the website and its e-learning platform, generated tens of thousands of dollars for the organisation, which allowed them to consider greater opportunities.

After handover, Ngā Māia took on maintenance in-house with their own administrator. The administrator wasn't design-focused, and over time that changed the look, feel, and operation of the website: some designs drifted from the original branding guidelines or became inconsistent, and the platform as a whole ended up underused. Next time, I would plan for this from the start, with simpler templates, written brand and content guidelines, and training built into the handover.

The other lesson is scope. There was a lot of scope creep during the project, and it drew the contract out longer than it needed to be. Because scope wasn't pinned down up front, I ended up taking on a lot of extra work. I now agree scope, and how changes to it are handled, before the build starts.