Rebuilding trust, authority, and a global research archive.
The Centre for Liberal Strategies lost access to their digital archive, home to two decades of political analysis by leading European thinkers. The task was not just technical recovery — it was ensuring those decades of scholarship stayed findable, citable, and protected.
- Client
- Centre for Liberal Strategies
- Category
- Think Tank · Content Migration
- Focus
- CMS Migration, SEO, UX Design
Snapshot
Restoring a national research archive
From forensic content recovery to a modern CMS and SEO foundation, the Centre's new site keeps decades of scholarship visible to journalists, policymakers, and readers worldwide.
2,000+
Articles Recovered
100% Live
Website Status
Complete
SEO Implementation
The Challenge
Losing a domain meant risking decades of institutional memory, global citations, and media credibility. The task was not just technical recovery.
Losing this archive permanently would have meant erasing two decades of citable scholarship from search, media, and policy record — material that journalists and academics across Europe reference regularly.
01
Decades of historical URLs had to be preserved exactly — any broken link meant lost citations and lost credibility
02
Search authority built over twenty years had to transfer without dilution during the domain migration
03
The editorial team needed confidence to publish immediately after launch, without technical risk
Key Architectural Decisions
Decision 01
Forensic content recovery first
Before building anything, I validated the entire archive via the Wayback Machine to ensure no content was lost or corrupted in migration.
Decision 02
CMS architecture for research, not publishing
Information architecture designed specifically for long-form research and policy analysis — not a generic publishing template.
Decision 03
Search-first UX and taxonomy
Prioritised discoverability over aesthetics, because a think tank's value depends on being found and cited.
Implementation
Recovery and rebuild happened in sprints — first validating the archive, then architecting a new platform designed for longevity.
Recovery
Forensic content recovery
Conducted full archive recovery via the Wayback Machine, validating content integrity before structured CMS import.
Architecture
URL mapping and information architecture
Mapped historical URLs to a modern information architecture with redirects, canonical tags, and structured categories.
Front-End
Search-first UX design
Designed a responsive front-end with search, topic hubs, and author pages to surface high-value research.
SEO
Technical SEO and performance
Rolled out meta data, schema, internal links, XML sitemaps, automated image optimisation, caching, asset compression, and a global CDN.
Handover
Editorial governance and training
Delivered hands-on training, documentation, and governance guidelines to protect publishing workflows long after launch.
The Results
The platform now safeguards decades of research while giving the organisation a publishing system built to last — supporting policy briefs, interviews, and long-form commentary without the fragility that caused the original loss.
2,000+
Articles Recovered
Full archive restored
100% Live
Archive Status
No content lost
Complete
SEO Rollout
On-page and technical
Preserved
Authority
Domain authority transferred
The Outcome
The Centre's archive is now more findable than it was before the domain was lost. Twenty years of scholarship, recovered and protected.
The next twenty have a foundation to build on.
Protect your search authority during change.
Migrations often lead to traffic drops. I design search-first architectures that preserve your domain authority and protect what you've built.