A medical board has had the same web team for 15 years. This is what that looks like.

A small board office with five websites to answer for

In its own words, "Established in 1986, the ABFPRS is dedicated to improving the quality of facial plastic surgery available to the public by measuring the qualifications of candidate surgeons against certain rigorous standards".

More of that work runs through websites than most people would guess. The board's main site holds the membership records and the public Physician Finder, where patients look for a certified surgeon near them. That page carries a line in bold: "The ABFPRS website is considered a primary source of verification". Two more sites deliver the yearly exams and the practice exams. The board's international arm has its own site, and so does the Global Alliance it works with.

That is five websites, run by a small office whose staff have full-time jobs that are not web management. We have been their web team since 2011.

Five websites could easily have meant five vendors

Organizations tend to collect vendors the way they collect websites. One firm built the main site, another hosts it, a third was hired for the special project. Each knows its own piece. When something crosses a boundary, a staff member becomes the go-between, carrying a request from one firm to another and hoping the explanation survives the trip.

The board's sites cross boundaries all the time. A surgeon's account on the main site is the account that opens the exam. A list that staff upload on the main site decides who can take a practice exam. A change to one site is often a change to three, and with separate vendors, every one of those would start with a meeting.

The board's calendar does not bend, either. Annual dues come around on the first of January. The yearly exam opens at the end of March and closes at the end of October. None of those dates move because a vendor is busy.

One team, and what that has meant year to year

We know the whole thing. We built the main site, the exam sites, and the two international sites, and we host and maintain all five. When staff ask for a change, we already know which other sites it touches, so they describe what they want once, to one team.

That includes the software. The yearly exams and practice exams and the members' area with its single login both grew out of this relationship, and each has its own story. They exist because the board could bring a need to people who already understood how the office works.

We rebuilt without starting over. In December 2022, the board launched a new main website, which we built. Members signed in to it with the passwords they already had, so a rebuild that meant a great deal to staff asked nothing of the surgeons.

The international sites came without a vendor search. When the board's international certification arm and the Global Alliance each needed a website, the board brought it to the team it already had. Each site got its own design, from people who already looked after everything else.

We do the housekeeping nobody sees. When the board's membership upload moved to a tool we built for it, the older import software sat unused. Before removing it, we confirmed when it had last run, searched the site for anything that still depended on it, took a backup, and kept an archive. Afterward, we checked that the member records were untouched and the pages looked exactly as before. Staff did not have to do anything, which was the point.

The same goes for small things, because we know where to look. When a surgeon whose surname contains an apostrophe was not turning up in the Physician Finder, staff told us, and patients could find that surgeon again the same day.

What staff think about now is not the websites

The staff member who would have been managing vendors manages the board's work. The year turns over on schedule: dues come around, the exam opens, the exam closes, and the sites are ready each time because the same people prepared them the year before.

Predictable is what a certification board wants from its websites. A patient finds a certified surgeon. Someone checking a credential finds the answer. A surgeon pays, prepares, and takes the exam. When the board needs something new, the conversation starts with 15 years of shared context already in the room.