Native Village of Port Heiden

Built and Ready for Council Approval: The Native Village of Port Heiden

The Native Village of Port Heiden is a federally recognized Tribe on the Alaska Peninsula, 424 air miles from Anchorage and reachable only by air and a twice-yearly barge. We designed and built three connected systems for the Tribe: a public website, a member portal and a staff console.

What We Built:

• A public website – The Tribe’s story, government, departments, environmental programs, news, events and contact, built to the Tribe’s own approved design.

• A member portal – For enrolled members only: fifteen Tribal forms online, every request tracked to a written reply, plus Council minutes, documents and an events calendar.

• A staff console – One inbox for every department, where requests are routed, assigned, answered and logged.

• Built for low bandwidth – Compressed images, inlined scripts and nothing loaded from third parties; tested at phone width on a slow connection and built to WCAG 2.1 AA.

• Owned by the Tribe – Every domain, hosting account and database goes in the Tribe’s name, and everything transfers back within thirty days at no charge if the relationship ends.

Where It Stands:

All three systems are built and tested on desktop and phone, and the Tribe’s existing pages and documents are ready to carry over. The public website goes live once the Tribal Council approves, and the portals follow.

Why It Matters:

Members, funders and federal agencies verify a Tribe by looking it up. A current website that the Tribe owns, with someone responsible for keeping it running, means anyone looking up Port Heiden finds the Tribe in its own words.