WordPress website design and development for Letters to the Presidents

cmsMinds designed and developed Letters to the Presidents for the National Archives Foundation, launched in June 2026 for the 250th anniversary of American independence. It brings historic letters between Americans and their presidents out of the archives and into an accessible, searchable website.

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Letters to the Presidents homepage with archival letters and the Explore Letters panel

About the client

History out of the vaults, into everyday life.

The National Archives Foundation is the independent nonprofit partner of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Its mission is to connect Americans to the records that tell the national story, funding exhibitions, educational programs and public initiatives.

The Presidential Libraries, managed by NARA, hold millions of documents from every modern presidency. Among them are letters from ordinary citizens, world leaders, celebrities, children, veterans and activists who wrote directly to the President, the unfiltered voice of the American people across nearly a century.

For the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Foundation wanted to bring a curated selection of these letters to the public through a purpose-built website. That project became Letters to the Presidents.

Letters to the Presidents on mobile, with National Archives and National Archives Foundation branding

Selected through: Competitive RFP
Timeline: 6 months, January–June 2026
Team: Project manager, design lead, tech lead, frontend developer

The challenge

800 letters, 14 libraries and a national deadline.

The site would unite letters from all 14 Presidential Libraries, from Hoover to Obama, in one public collection, and it had to be ready for the nation’s biggest civic milestone in a generation.

Interactive U.S. map for exploring letters by location

A deadline tied to America's 250th

January kickoff, June delivery. The site had to launch ahead of the national America 250 celebrations, so every phase had to land on time.
Federal accessibility standards

As a National Archives-affiliated property, the site needed WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance, alignment with the U.S. Web Design System and strong Core Web Vitals on mobile, where image-heavy archival content strains load times.
800 letters, 14 presidents, 50 states

A collection this large is only useful if visitors can find what they want: filters by president, topic, sender and location, full-text search and an interactive U.S. map, with filters that respond to each other.
A research API, a public audience

The NARA Catalog API returns deeply nested, research-oriented data that was never designed for public browsing, so raw records needed a transformation layer before they could power a fast website.
A growing archive, no content team

New letters are digitized and transcribed all the time. The site had to stay in sync with the catalog automatically, with no manual content entry.

Our approach

Separate layers for data, content and presentation.

cmsMinds was selected through a competitive RFP after detailed question rounds and discovery calls. We planned the architecture from the start, with distinct layers for data processing, content management and front-end presentation, each doing what it does best.

USWDS design system with custom branding

A fully custom WordPress theme built on USWDS v3.13 and customized through Sass theme tokens. PurgeCSS and conditional JavaScript loading keep the site lean.
Accessibility from wireframe to launch

WCAG 2.0 Level AA was part of every sprint: keyboard navigation, screen reader support, heading hierarchy, meaningful alt text and color contrast, from day one.
A Cloudflare Worker as the data layer

A Cloudflare Worker sits between the NARA API and WordPress, running searches, fetching data in parallel and returning clean objects, so upstream API changes stay out of the WordPress codebase.

What we built

A living archive, not a static exhibit.

Linked filters and a U.S. map

Self-contained ACF blocks power Explore Letters, the interactive map, events and editorial heroes. Choosing a president narrows the topics, senders and locations in real time.
Automated import with audit logs

Two importers run on a WordPress cron every 15 days, updating records, mapping taxonomies, attaching media and storing OCR text and transcriptions. An admin log shows every sync.
A rich page for every letter

Each letter shows its scanned pages and PDF beside machine OCR and transcriptions from NARA's citizen archivists. Tags link to related letters across the collection.

The results

Launched in June 2026, in time for America's 250th.

14Presidential Libraries in one collection
~800Letters across 14 administrations
100 / 95+Lighthouse scores, desktop / mobile

One of the first websites to unite letters from all 14 Presidential Libraries in one searchable collection.
A content pipeline that mirrors the National Archives Catalog, so new letters appear every sync with no editorial work.
WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance and USWDS v3.13 alignment, as expected of a National Archives-affiliated property.
A modular ACF block codebase held to strict standards: PHPCS, ESLint and Stylelint with BEM.