Public Website Maintenance and Support

Boulder County, Colorado is requesting proposals for comprehensive website maintenance, support, hosting management, accessibility oversight, and ongoing development services for its enterprise WordPress environment and supporting AWS infrastructure under RFP 309-26, with proposals due September 18, 2026. No diversity or minority business participation goals apply; however, international firms are ineligible.

The scope encompasses 11 public-facing WordPress sites hosting 6,163 total pages, with the primary site (bouldercounty.gov) receiving 4.1 million visits and 7.3 million pageviews in 2025. Required capabilities include WordPress 6.8.6 and newer multi-site administration, custom child theme and plugin development, 23 specific WordPress plugins, WP Bakery page builder integration, and third-party system integration with GovDelivery, Salesforce, and forms platforms. AWS experience must cover reserved instance management, IAM user management, load balancing, Aurora RDS, CloudFront, EC2, Lambda, and S3 services. The vendor must demonstrate expertise in secure jump host management (Ubuntu Linux), Apache/Elastic Beanstalk front-end configuration, Git-based source control (preferably Beanstalkapp), and code deployment (preferably DeployBot). Website accessibility compliance with WCAG 2.1-2.2 standards is mandatory. Subcontractors are not acceptable; external resources that are legal parts of the vendor's organization are permissible.

The annual not-to-exceed budget is $175,000 for all labor, maintenance, support, and enhancement work; AWS infrastructure costs, plugin licenses, themes, and subscriptions are paid separately by the County. The initial contract term is one year with options to renew for up to four additional one-year terms at the County's sole discretion, with an anticipated start date of January 1, 2027. The incumbent is Insight Designs Web Solutions; no knowledge transfer will be provided by the incumbent.

Evaluation criteria total 225 points: WordPress Experience (50), AWS Hosting Experience (50), Website Process Workflow (25), Website Performance Monitoring and Optimization (25), Website Accessibility Experience (25), Rate Sheet/Proposed Pricing (25), Resource Training and Development (10), Resource Management and Responsiveness (10), and Value Adds (5). The County prefers pricing alternatives to time-and-materials billing, including monthly retainers with separately scoped enhancements, fixed-bid models, and managed service capacity arrangements.

The contractor must obtain Professional Liability (Errors & Omissions) insurance of $1,000,000 per loss and $1,000,000 aggregate, General Liability of $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, and Workers' Compensation at statutory limits before contract execution. Boulder County must be named as an additional insured. Proposals must be submitted electronically through the Boulder County Bonfire portal in PDF, Word, or Excel format; archived files, links, and Google Docs are not accepted. Addenda 1, 2, and 3 have been issued; vendor selection is expected in October 2026 with contract negotiation before December 31, 2026.