The audit said fix it. The math said start over.

The Central Arkansas Library System needed cals.org to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and the federal deadline was about four months out. They asked us to audit the site and tell them how far they had to go. The answer: of the 76 checks in our audit, only 41 passed clean. A primary brand color that wasn’t accessibility compliant. No keyboard navigation. Focus states and alt tags missing everywhere.

And the audit wasn’t even the real problem. The site was an aging WordPress multisite with 1,862 pages on the main site alone, 972 of them tag archives, plus a page builder the staff had spent years fighting and a homepage that froze the browser for nearly 12 seconds. Patching accessibility onto that foundation would have cost more than replacing it.

So we told them the uncomfortable thing: don’t fix it. Rebuild it. Same deadline.

We broke the multisite into five standalone sites: CALS.org, Roberts Library, Ron Robinson Theater, Rock It! Lab, and Six Bridges Book Festival. Each got an information architecture built from analytics instead of instinct. Traffic data decided what earned a place in the navigation, and thousands of orphaned pages quietly retired.

The design keeps the brand CALS already had, handled honestly. Their orange fails contrast with text of any color, so the new system is mostly black and white, with the brand colors doing accent work and never sitting under type. Editors got a flexible block system designed with the staff who publish every day. It’s hard to make an off-brand page with it. It’s harder to make an inaccessible one. The branch pages became a real directory: list and map views, live open hours, amenity filters, and holiday logic that handles itself.

Then we made the whole thing repeatable. Every feature in the theme lives behind a switch: a new site gets its own name, its own accent color, and only the features it needs, all from one options screen. A blog on one site, a News feed on another, branch listings where they make sense. A toggle, not a ticket to a developer.

Underneath, the unglamorous work that makes a migration hold: roughly 3,000 redirects mapped so decades of old URLs still land somewhere useful, and every third-party script audited and cut to only what a library actually needs.

All five sites launched in late April 2026, inside the original four-month window. The deadline later got extended. We didn’t need it. And the audit that started all this came back clean before launch: all 76 checks passing.

The main site is 81 percent smaller, and traffic rose 17 percent anyway, like for like, with search click-through nearly doubled: half the pages, twice the hit rate. The new branch directory drew about 75,000 views in its first five months; the old branch pages did about 50,000 in all of 2025. And the number a library actually cares about: 3,517 new library cards signed up through the site.

CALS is building the sixth site, Library Square Books, entirely on their own.

Less site. More library.