The Mace Group: South Carolina political-media WordPress retainer, 2009-2011

Multi-year WordPress® retainer for a South Carolina political-media firm and its client roster, running from February 2009 through July 2011. The work began in February 2009 with a server migration for the principal's predecessor consulting practice; when the firm incorporated as Mace Group LLC in 2010, the engagement carried straight over and grew into a standing retainer covering the firm, the principal's personal site, and several political clients on the firm's book.

The Mace Group LLC firm website, January 2012 archive snapshot, showing the public-relations / web / design service navigation and a SAIA case-study hero. — The Mace Group LLC firm site, captured from Internet Archive Wayback Machine, January 20, 2012.

Archived capture (January 2012): view macegroupllc.com on the Wayback Machine.

What I built and ran

Migrated FITS News, a high-traffic South Carolina political news site, off shared hosting onto Rackspace. WordPress install on the new infrastructure, DNS cutover, post-migration cache work, and ongoing server-incident response.
Built and maintained sites for the firm and its political clients, including a sitting state legislator later elected to the U.S. Senate, and a sitting U.S. House member at the time of the engagement.
Shipped on-demand feature work: a custom donation-progress widget, campaign iframe embeds, photo galleries, IE8 cross-browser fixes, video embed compatibility, and category-level AdSense filtering driven by editorial taxonomy.
Monthly retainer invoicing across the engagement. Same-weekend turnaround was the norm for urgent ad-policy and editorial changes.

The firm

The Mace Group LLC was a South Carolina digital-strategy and political-media firm. The firm's principal founded it in 2010 and was later elected to public office.

I mapped the Mace Group network the way I ran it, with the firm at the centre, the sites its retainer covered around it, and the shared features I built once and reused across all of them.

Reference

You rock. Do u think this will suffice the Google adsense gods?
Client, after a same-weekend FITS News fix, June 19, 2011

The engagement also produced active inbound referrals across the South Carolina political-digital network during 2010 and 2011.

One of the campaigns supported under this retainer is documented separately: 2010 U.S. House campaign: South Carolina 1st district (subcontract). Same shape of work as my WordPress development practice today: long-running retainer engagements where same-day turnaround on editorial and platform issues is the contract.