PS Engage
PS-engage advises multinationals on government relations across Asia, but its website was thin, hard to use and did not look the part. We designed and built a new WordPress site that has run since 2019.
PS-engage now has a WordPress site that presents its services to multinational clients, carries its blog and careers pages, and has stayed on our hosting and care since launch in 2019.
What we were solving
PS-engage is a Singapore-based government relations consultancy. Founded in 2014 by Jeff Paine, it helps multinationals, foundations and industry groups work with governments across Asia Pacific: market intelligence, policy advocacy, licensing, constructive engagement programmes and thought leadership.
Its clients are large, careful companies. Its website in late 2018 was not. The team's own discovery notes called it hard to use, thin on content, difficult to get around and "not upmarket". It had no careers page, nowhere to publish reports or blog posts, and no way to show the breadth of what the firm did.
There was one more constraint that most consultancies never face. PS-engage works with governments across the region, so the design could not lean towards any one country's colours or imagery. It had to look neutral, senior and trustworthy at the same time.
The brief was a full rebuild, keeping the existing content and positioning as the starting point.
How we tackled it
Sitemap first, then two designs
We started with a sitemap in January 2019, built from the discovery questionnaire and a design strategy call. The first draft missed pages the client had asked for (careers, thought leadership, blog, events, news, privacy) so we corrected it before anyone saw a design. Sarthak Luthra, the firm's government relations analyst, approved the structure within the week.
Homepage design went through two rounds and an internal page template followed in mid February. Feedback came in as comments on the mockups and in a face-to-face meeting in Singapore.
Services as pages, not a list
The meeting produced a twelve-point change list, and most of it was about structure. Leadership Activities became Constructive Engagement. Each service got its own page with content on past work. Media, events and client logos came out. Partnerships with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the American Chamber of Commerce moved into About Us. A "why government relations matters" page got a designed layout rather than a wall of text.
We built the site on WordPress with a custom theme on the Genesis framework and Beaver Builder, staged on WP Engine, and demoed it over Zoom in late March.
Live in a fortnight of final edits
Copy edits, a blog template fix and a few mobile checks took two weeks. The client was bidding for new work and wanted the site up. We moved it live on 8 April 2019, ran a training session the following month and handed over a website owner's manual in December.
What we delivered
PS-engage now has a website that does the job its old one couldn't. Services each have a page. The blog carries policy commentary from the team. Careers lists senior advisor roles in India and Thailand. The firm has hosted the site with us since launch, and we still handle its updates, security and user accounts as staff change. In 2022 we moved it to our Cloudways platform alongside the Asia Internet Coalition site (aicasia.org), which we also built and host for the firm.
What we learned
Check the sitemap against the discovery notes before design starts. The first draft dropped five pages the client had already asked for, and catching that on day one saved a design round.
A long client relationship is not the same as a long project. The build took three months. The hosting and care that followed have run for seven years and are where most of the value, for both sides, has been.
