A public infrastructure programme’s website has a harder job than a company’s. It is not trying to persuade anyone to buy. It is accountable to people who were affected by a disaster, to contractors bidding for work, to donor institutions, and to anyone who wants to check whether a claim circulating on social media is true.
IFRAP, the Integrated Flood Resilience and Adaptation Project, is a flood recovery programme in Balochistan, Pakistan. Its website is built around transparency obligations rather than marketing goals, and that changes almost every structural decision.
Key Takeaways
- A public programme site serves at least four audiences at once: affected communities, contractors, partner institutions and the press. Each needs a different entry point.
- Procurement notices and career listings are time-sensitive documents, not content. They need to be easy to publish quickly and easy to find while current.
- The homepage needs a place for official clarifications, because misinformation about a funding programme appears faster than any content calendar can respond to.
- Programme structure should drive site structure. IFRAP’s components map directly onto the navigation.
What Is IFRAP?
IFRAP stands for the Integrated Flood Resilience and Adaptation Project. It covers flood recovery and resilience work in Balochistan across several distinct components:
- Community Infrastructure Rehabilitation
- Modernization of Hydromet Services in Pakistan
- Resilient Housing Reconstruction and Restoration
- Livelihood Support and Watershed Management
- Project Management, Technical Assistance and Institutional Strengthening
Each of those is a substantial programme in its own right, with its own scope, targets and reporting. The site gives each one a page rather than summarising them into a single “what we do” section, because a contractor or a partner institution needs the detail of one component, not an overview of all five.
How Is a Public Programme Website Different?
The difference is that the site’s primary obligation is accuracy and availability rather than conversion. Nobody is being sold anything. People are checking facts, looking for tenders, applying for jobs, or trying to find out whether their village is in scope.
Four audiences, four entry points
Most organisational websites are built for one audience with a secondary one tolerated. A programme site cannot do that.
- Affected communities and the public need scope, targets and plain explanations of what the programme covers.
- Contractors and suppliers need procurement notices, and they need them while the window is open. A tender found after the deadline is worse than useless.
- Job applicants need current vacancies with enough detail to self-assess. IFRAP’s site carries individually listed positions rather than a generic careers page.
- Partners, donors and journalists need plans, frameworks and reports they can cite, plus named governance.
Each of those is a separate top-level destination on the site. Merging any two of them would make at least one audience dig through content aimed at someone else.
The homepage needs room for a correction
One of the more instructive things about this site is that its homepage carries an official clarification responding to claims circulating on social media about housing reconstruction funds.
That is not a content type most website briefs anticipate, and it should be. A programme distributing public money will at some point face a rumour that spreads faster than any planned communication. If the only way to respond is to commission a new page, the response arrives days late and lands nowhere near the people who saw the claim.
The structural lesson is simple: build a slot for an official statement into the homepage from the start. It costs nothing while empty and it is the difference between responding on the day and responding next week.
Governance has to be visible and named
The site names the officials and institutional figures associated with the programme. For a donor-supported public project, anonymity reads as evasion. Named governance is part of the accountability the programme is subject to, and putting it on the website is the cheapest form of it.
What Does This Mean for Structure?
The principle we worked to is that the site map should mirror the programme’s own structure, not a marketing information architecture invented on top of it.
IFRAP’s components each have a page. Scope and targets has a page. Procurements, careers, partners, the team and media resources are all top-level. Someone who knows the programme can find the thing they know exists; someone who does not can read the components and understand what the programme consists of.
This sounds obvious and it is regularly not done. The common failure is to restructure a public programme’s content around themes that read better, which leaves the people who use the site daily unable to find documents they know by name.
What We Would Watch
Procurement and careers content goes stale faster than anything else on a site like this, and stale tender notices actively mislead. A closed tender left visible without a status marker wastes a contractor’s time and damages trust in the whole section. Any site carrying time-bound notices needs a clear convention for marking them closed, and someone whose job it is to apply it.
The second is document accessibility. Programme reports are usually published as PDFs, and a PDF is not searchable in the way a page is, does not work well on a phone, and is often unreadable to screen readers. Where a document is important enough that people need to find it through search, it is worth publishing a page alongside the PDF rather than only the file.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a government or NGO website different from a business one?
The purpose. A business site is measured on conversion; a public programme site is measured on whether the right people can find accurate, current information. That changes the structure, the tone and what counts as success.
How should procurement notices be published?
Somewhere findable without navigating the rest of the site, with the deadline visible before the document is opened, and with closed notices clearly marked rather than silently removed. Removing them destroys the record; leaving them unmarked misleads.
Should a programme website have a news section?
Yes, and it needs to be genuinely maintained. An empty or abandoned news section is read as a signal that the programme itself is inactive, which for a recovery programme is actively harmful.
Why publish named governance?
Because accountability is the point. For programmes handling public or donor funds, naming the people responsible is part of the transparency the programme is already subject to offline.
Working on a Public Programme?
If you are responsible for communicating a publicly funded programme, the website’s hardest requirements are usually not visual. They are about keeping time-sensitive documents current, and being able to respond to a claim on the day it appears.
See more of our work in our portfolio, read how we scope projects on our process page, or get in touch.
