Te Mātāwai

Te Mātāwai's existing website no longer matched the scale or importance of its mission. Koda Web was engaged to redesign and rebuild the platform, with a clear set of requirements to address:

• The site needed to work as a genuinely bilingual experience in te reo Māori and English — not an English site with translated pages bolted on — including correct macron support and easy toggling between languages
• Content such as reports, learning plans, videos and podcasts was difficult to find, with no searchable resource hub or consistent tagging across content types
• The platform needed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, reflecting its role as a public-facing entity supporting a national kaupapa
• The design needed to feel unmistakably grounded in Te Ao Māori, regional landscapes and storytelling, rather than a generic institutional template
• Te Mātāwai's own team needed a content system they could manage confidently in-house, with clear roles and permissions
• As a platform handling public and administrative data, security and long-term reliability were non-negotiable
   

Koda Web ran a discovery phase with Te Mātāwai stakeholders to confirm goals, user personas, content types and functionality, then designed and built a custom Drupal 10 platform around those findings:

Genuinely bilingual by design

• A bilingual site structure with a floating language toggle, native macron support, and language fallback so nothing renders broken if a translation is still in progress
• SEO tagging and metadata handled per language, so both te reo Māori and English content are equally discoverable

A searchable home for Te Mātāwai's content

• A searchable resource hub for reports, learning plans and media, with a tagging system connecting related articles, reports and resources
• Structured content types for articles, reports, video and podcast content, events and multimedia, with video embeds, slideshows and image galleries built in

Designed around kaupapa Māori

• Homepage and template designs drawing on Te Ao Māori, regional landscapes and multimedia storytelling, refined with Te Mātāwai stakeholders through a structured review and sign-off process
• Searchable categories with filters by tag, author, content type and region

Built for the Te Mātāwai team

• A secure admin interface with role-based access control, so staff can manage content confidently without needing developer support
• Legacy content migrated and restructured, with metadata, SEO and taxonomies applied so nothing lost value in the move
• Training delivered to Te Mātāwai staff ahead of launch, alongside cross-browser, mobile and accessibility testing against WCAG guidelines

The result is a platform that carries the mana of Te Mātāwai's kaupapa online. Whānau, hapū and iwi can find reports, learning resources and stories in the language of their choice, presented through a design grounded in Te Ao Māori rather than borrowed from a generic template. Te Mātāwai's own team can publish and manage rich, multimedia content independently, in both languages, without relying on outside help for routine changes. And because the platform was built on a modern, actively supported version of Drupal with accessibility and security built in from the start, it's positioned to grow — including future support for a third language — without another ground-up rebuild.

Koda Web builds on Drupal for public sector and community organisations precisely because of the flexibility, security and content control it offers — all of which mattered for a platform of Te Mātāwai's significance.

Security

The platform was built around encrypted authentication for all CMS administrators and users, role-based access control across content types and administrative functions, and secure deployment pipelines with code versioning, peer review and staging environments ahead of every release. A Web Application Firewall filters malicious traffic and guards against common threats such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, all traffic runs over HTTPS, and two-factor authentication is available for admin users who want the extra layer of protection. Drupal core and all contributed and custom modules are patched on a monthly maintenance cycle, and the site underwent penetration testing prior to go-live — the standard Koda applies to platforms handling public and administrative data.

Performance

The site is hosted on AWS or Koda's own high-availability cluster with a 99.9% uptime target, backed by daily backups, 24/7 availability monitoring and a content delivery network so pages load quickly for visitors across New Zealand and further afield. Drupal's database-driven architecture means Te Mātāwai's team can keep adding structured content — reports, videos, podcasts, events — without the platform slowing down or needing re-engineering as the resource hub grows.

SEO

Search visibility was treated as a bilingual problem from day one, not an English-only add-on. Metadata and keyword optimisation were applied per page and per resource in both te reo Māori and English, with a tagging and related-content system that helps search engines and visitors alike understand how reports, articles and resources connect. Migrated content was restructured with clean taxonomies and modern URL and metadata patterns rather than carried over as-is, and Google Analytics was configured from launch so Te Mātāwai can see how people are finding and using the site in each language.