On building serious websites for serious places.

Fit For Gov is a single-principal civic-technology practice, registered in British Columbia, building custom municipal websites and civic software for Canadian municipalities. The work is delivered direct, without a tier of account managers between principal and council, because municipal websites are not the kind of work that survives a hand-off.

What we ship looks unremarkable from the outside, which is the point. Static HTML, served from a Canadian edge, versioned in a git repository the municipality co-owns. Three production dependencies. A bill of materials a CAO can read in an afternoon. The architecture is the security posture.

The opposite is the inheritance most municipalities are still paying for: a content management system written for blogs in 2003, hardened against the problems of 2003, and quietly leaking against the problems of 2026. Hamilton disclosed an $18.3 million recovery from a single ransomware event in June 2025. Hamilton was not unusual. Hamilton was simply early to admit it.

The work this atelier exists to do is to replace that inheritance, one municipality at a time, with something that ships under the direct-award threshold and still passes an audit five years later.

Fit or Forward is the first promise this practice makes on a discovery call. If the work isn’t the right shape for what your municipality needs, you hear that on the call, and you leave the call with the name of someone who can do it. The promise has cost the practice work it would have taken otherwise. The promise is the work.

The version most consultancies offer instead is yes, always, in every register. The yes is a tax on the council that signed the contract and the staff who absorb the consequences. Hamilton knew the WordPress install on its public site was vulnerable for three years before the ransomware event made the conversation public. Most municipalities know. Most consultancies will not be the ones to say so.

What follows from this commitment is a smaller annual revenue ceiling, fewer simultaneous engagements, and a far longer roster of municipalities who took the forwarding referral and stayed in touch. That ceiling, those referrals, and the calls that begin with “you were the only one who didn’t pitch us” are the practice’s actual asset.

What the atelier builds.

1. I.

   Municipal websites. Custom-built, statically generated, served from a Canadian edge. Built to outlast the procurement cycle that commissioned them. WCAG 2.1 AA, bilingual where required, versioned in a git repository the municipality co-owns from the first commit.

2. II.

   Civic software. Reservation systems, permit portals, internal tools that the existing vendor either won’t build or charges three times the hardware cost to maintain. Scoped tight, shipped under the direct-award threshold where the engagement permits.

3. III.

   Audit and advisory. A written assessment of your current stack — its vulnerabilities, its remediation cost, its honest end-of-life. Delivered as a document the CAO can put in front of council without translation.

4. IV.

   WordPress migration. When a rebuild is the right call. Content, redirects, search index continuity — the work that determines whether the new site is a credit to the council that approved it or a six-month complaint queue.

5. V.

   RFP collaboration. Co-authoring the specification and architecture sections of municipal RFPs. The work that decides which vendors can credibly bid before the bid window opens. Often the highest-leverage hour of the engagement.