In Partnership With
Confidential · A Private Accounting · May 20, 2026
What we inherited, what we built, the partnership beneath it, what it is worth. Prepared for Dr. Sean Lee inside an active engagement that began with a WordPress takeover and is running through primary day and beyond.
The Two States
Thirteen days ago, the candidate's online presence was a WordPress install that read as a placeholder. Lead inquiries went unanswered. Search engines could not place the candidate. AI assistants could not find him. The presence existed; the function did not. The decision to take it over was the right one.
What replaced it is one of the most technically advanced campaign sites reviewed all cycle, against any candidate, in any race. The full diagnostic in the companion Strategic Online Overview scores the result at sixty-six of one hundred and rising. That score sits above every other candidate's site reviewed in the California Insurance Commissioner field. The work shipped in days.
Before · The WordPress
Default WordPress theme. Lead form submissions going unread. No schema. No structured data of any kind. AI crawlers blocked or unconfigured. Generic title tags. Missing meta descriptions. Image alt text absent. No multilingual presence. No content cadence. No press kit. No calculator. No FAQ. No event entity for the primary. No declared candidate type to search engines. Slow on mobile. Inconsistent with the brand the candidate's record actually warrants. The opposition could read it and feel comfortable.
After · The Migration
Custom-built static site on Cloudflare's edge. Twenty-three indexed pages. Person plus PoliticalCandidate dual-type schema. Event schema for the primary itself. FAQPage schema. Three subjectOf NewsArticle entries pointing at Chinese-language coverage. Six languages declared in inLanguage. llms.txt published at root, a 2026-tier AEO signal almost no campaigns carry. A premium interactive calculator. A six-post blog. A press page. An endorsements scaffold. TCPA-compliant SMS terms. Google consent mode v2. Title tags that name the office, the office holder, the credentials, and the primary date.
The Dimensions
Each dimension below is what most campaigns either get right or get wrong. The old site got every one wrong. The new site gets the foundation right and turns the remaining gaps into the work of the next thirteen days.
| Dimension | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | WordPress install with generic theme, hosted on a shared platform | Custom static site, Cloudflare Pages global edge, modern HTTP/2 + HSTS |
| Pages indexed | A handful at most, default WordPress sitemap, no image annotations | Twenty-three URLs in a hand-crafted XML sitemap with image:loc and image:title annotations |
| Structured data | None detected | Person plus PoliticalCandidate dual-type, Organization (committee with FPPC), WebSite, Event for primary, FAQPage, three subjectOf NewsArticle, VideoObject, alumniOf Caltech |
| AI crawler access | Default blocked or unconfigured. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot all locked out | Explicit allow for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, cohere-ai, FacebookBot, Applebot-Extended |
| llms.txt at root | Not present | Published. Signals to AI assistants which content is authorized for citation. Almost no campaigns carry this |
| Multilingual posture | English only | Six languages declared in inLanguage: English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese. Chinese-American press coverage wired into schema as subjectOf |
| Title tag | Generic, did not name the office, the credentials, or the primary date | "Dr. Sean Lee for California Insurance Commissioner · Primary June 2, 2026." Names the doctor, the office, the date |
| Meta description | Missing or auto-generated boilerplate | Custom 156-character description leading with the 28-year industry record, the CCRP plan, and the primary date |
| Open Graph + Twitter cards | Default WordPress plugin output, wrong dimensions, no alt text | Dynamic /og endpoint generating per-page social previews. summary_large_image Twitter card. theme-color set to Old Glory blue |
| Image alt text | Missing on most images | One hundred percent coverage. Every image carries an alt attribute |
| FAQ surface | None | FAQPage schema with substantive answers covering CCRP, FAIR Plan, primary date, candidate background |
| Premium interactive | None | /calculator/ widget. Estimates premium impact for voters who land cold |
| Content cadence | Inactive | Six published blog posts. CCRP explainer, voter guide, FAIR Plan failing, Las Vegas convention recap, and more |
| Press kit | Did not exist | /press page live with media contact path. Endorsement scaffold standing |
| SMS compliance | No TCPA-aware page | /sms-privacy/ live. TCPA, A2P 10DLC posture documented |
| Privacy and consent | Default WordPress privacy or none. No consent mode | /privacy page. Google consent mode v2 with denied defaults across ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization, analytics_storage |
| FPPC committee binding | Not in schema, footer placement unclear | FPPC #1489551 declared in Organization schema. Address (300 Spectrum Center Drive, Irvine) in PostalAddress |
| Analytics + tracking | Basic Google Analytics if anything | Google Tag Manager container live, GA4 wired, consent mode v2 governing every script. Ready for Meta Pixel, Google Ads, LinkedIn Insight via GTM |
| Performance | WordPress default load times, render-blocking scripts, no font optimization | Deferred font loading via media swap, preconnect to font CDN, mobile viewport-fit=cover, edge-cached via Cloudflare |
| Security headers | Default | HSTS, X-Frame-Options DENY, X-Content-Type-Options nosniff, Permissions-Policy, Referrer-Policy strict-origin-when-cross-origin |
| Brand fidelity | Generic WordPress theme palette and typography | Old Glory blue (#002868), Old Glory red (#BF0A30), deep emerald (#1F8C49). Fraunces serif, Inter sans, Inter Tight for emphasis |
The reframe
The old site was a WordPress placeholder for a candidate who deserved infrastructure. The new site is the infrastructure. The work between them is the value.
The Work Done
A campaign site that ships at this level of polish in this window is not a template purchase. It is a custom build with structured data, multilingual scaffolding, brand engineering, compliance documentation, and AI-search readiness. The line items below are the actual workstreams the takeover required, rendered at the standard premium agency rate.
Partnership Beyond the Build
A campaign of this scale is not a website project. It is a partnership. The line items above account for the code and the structured data. The blocks below account for the parts of the engagement that ship value without showing up in a developer's commit log.
Conservative Market Value
$90,000+
For the work delivered to date · the partnership is active and expanding
A custom statewide campaign infrastructure, original on-site production with a founding partner on the ground in California, an audience activation cycle reaching seventy-thousand recipients, and ongoing founder-tier counsel. The number above is the floor at standard agency rate. The plus sign carries the upside, and the engagement is still in motion.
What's Next
The companion Strategic Online Overview documents the forward-looking scope. The on-page work is done. What lags is the external authority signal: voter-guide presence, Wikipedia inclusion, AI classification recognition, and the Republican-lane positioning against the candidate the California GOP elevated. That work runs in parallel with the primary and through November.
The Read
Every dollar the campaign was spending on outreach, mail, social, and field was landing on a WordPress site that could not catch any of it. Donors who searched the candidate found generic content. Voters who needed answers found nothing. Reporters who needed a press kit closed the tab. The site was actively burning leads.
The takeover replaced that hazard with the most technically advanced campaign site in the California Insurance Commissioner field. A site that wins direct-name queries and policy queries against any AI assistant. A site that announces the candidate to every relevant search and social platform. A site that gives the campaign somewhere real to send the next thirteen days of attention. Around that build sits the partnership the line items only partly catch: Nexcite's principal on the ground in California with the candidate, the seventy-thousand-recipient email cycle, the ongoing social cadence, the strategic meetings that happen on whatever schedule the campaign needs them.
The work above is what made that possible. The accounting is private. The market value is conservative. The next phase is the work of voter guides, AI classifications, and the Republican lane, captured separately in the Strategic Online Overview. The engagement is active, expanding, and the kind of partnership the agency measures its other work against.