By Bianca Frank, Creative Director · Bianca Frank Design, Anchorage
Originally published March 2025. Rewritten and updated October 2026.
A tribal government or Alaska Native organization website has three jobs: deliver services to members, carry the community’s identity and language on its own terms, and show funders, partners and members that the organization is run well. Most tribal websites we’re asked to look at do one of the three. The ones that work do all three, and they’re built so staff can keep them current after the designer is gone.
This is what we’ve learned building sites with the Native Village of Barrow, Fairbanks Native Association and the Gwich’in Steering Committee, written for the administrator, council member or communications person who has been handed the project.
In short:
- Decide what the site is for before anyone talks about how it looks: services, identity and accountability each need their own place.
- The tribe or organization owns the domain, the hosting account and every file. Not the vendor, not a former employee.
- Your members are on phones, often on slow connections, often in communities you reach by air. Build for that first.
- Your language belongs on the site in its own orthography, which means checking that the fonts can actually display it.
- Plan for staff turnover from day one: documented, simple, with more than one person trained.
- If you’re writing an RFP, the checklist near the end will save you a round of questions.
The three jobs
Services. For most members, the website is where they look for a form, a phone number, a meeting date or a job posting. Enrollment, housing, tribal court, ICWA contacts, energy assistance, scholarship deadlines, council notices, RFPs for vendors. These need to be findable in two taps from the home page by someone who has never used the site, and the pages need a named person or department behind them.
Identity. The site is also how the community presents itself: its name in its own language, its land, its history told by its own people, its Elders, its events. This is the part most templates flatten into a stock photo and a paragraph. It deserves real photographs with permission and credit, the community’s own art, and the words the community chooses.
Accountability. Tribal governments and Native nonprofits answer to members, to councils and to funders. Meeting minutes, ordinances, annual reports, audited financials where appropriate, program outcomes and board lists all belong on the site, dated and easy to find. A funder or a member who can find last quarter’s report without calling the office trusts the organization more. This is also where grant requirements for public notice and transparency get met.
A site that does only the first job feels like a kiosk. Only the second, a brochure. Only the third, a filing cabinet. Structure the navigation so all three have a home and none crowds out the others.
Who decides, and who owns it
Before design starts, settle three things in writing.
Who approves. Council, a committee, an executive director, a communications lead? A tribal website project with no named decision-maker stalls at every step. We ask for one point of contact with authority and a defined approval process (what goes to council, what doesn’t), and we build the timeline around council meeting dates.
Who owns the accounts. The domain registration, the hosting account, the email, the analytics, the social accounts: all registered to the organization with a shared organizational email, not to a staff member’s personal address and not to the design agency. We’ve been asked to help organizations recover sites held by a vendor or by someone who left; it is slow and sometimes impossible. Who should own the domain and hosting is covered separately; for a tribe it is non-negotiable.
What’s public, what’s internal, what’s not for the site at all. Some knowledge is shared only within the community, or only in person, or only by certain people. The website team needs to know which content falls where before it’s drafted, and the site needs a members-only area or an internal channel for the middle category. Nobody outside the community decides this; the designer’s job is to ask and to build the structure that respects the answer.
Designing with the community
The original version of this post said we listen first. Here is what that means in practice.
- Hear from the people who’ll use it, not only the people who commissioned it. Leadership and program staff, yes. Also the front desk person who answers the same five questions every day, the Elder who will be asked what the home page should say, the young person who’ll check the site on a phone, and the member who lives in Anchorage or Seattle and relies on it to stay connected.
- Use the community’s own imagery, with permission and credit. No pan-Indigenous stock art, no generic feathers, no borrowed motifs from another region. If the community has artists, commission them. If it has a photo archive, use it with the family’s consent for every identifiable person.
- Write in the organization’s voice. Formal where the council is formal, warm where the programs are warm. We draft; the community edits.
- Expect to be told no. Sometimes a design direction is wrong for reasons the designer can’t see. That’s the process working.
Access: where your members actually are
Alaska’s tribal communities are spread across places you reach by air, by boat, by ferry or by a long drive, and the site has to work in all of them.
- Connection speed. Many members are on a phone with a weak or metered connection. Small images, no autoplaying video, no page that needs a dozen scripts to load. A form that works on a bad connection matters more than an animation that works on a good one.
- Devices. Older phones and shared computers at the tribal office, the school or the clinic. The site should work on a five-year-old Android phone, in a browser that hasn’t been updated.
- Elders and visual access. Large readable type, high contrast, captions, pages that print cleanly for posting at the store or the post office. These are also the basics of website accessibility, which many funders now expect in writing.
- Members outside the community. A large share of enrolled members live in Anchorage, Fairbanks or out of state. For them the site is the main connection: news, enrollment, scholarships, event livestreams, the obituaries page. Design for them as a first audience, not an afterthought.
Language and orthography
If the community’s language goes on the site, it should display correctly everywhere. Iñupiaq, Gwich’in, Yup’ik, Tlingit and other Alaska languages use characters that many web fonts don’t include, such as ġ, ŋ, ł, ą, ı and the apostrophe used as a letter. A font without them substitutes a box or a wrong character, and the site that was meant to honor the language misspells it on every page.
We test the chosen fonts against the full character set before anything is designed, make sure the site’s text encoding supports it, and set up the content editor so staff can type the characters without copying and pasting from a document. Place names, department names, greetings and headings in the language are a design asset; they’re also the first thing a member notices if they’re wrong.
Three projects, briefly
Native Village of Barrow. A tribal government in Utqiaġvik, the northernmost community in the United States, reached by air. The job was to make government services findable: departments, forms, contacts and council notices restructured so a member could get to what they needed in two steps, with the look of the site drawn from the land and the people rather than a template.
Fairbanks Native Association. A Fairbanks nonprofit with many programs across several departments, each with its own staff and audience. The rebuilt site organizes those programs so a family looking for one service isn’t wading through the others, with a structure that staff in each department can update themselves.
Gwich’in Steering Committee. An advocacy organization formed by the Gwich’in Nation to protect the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. Its site has a different first job: making the case to the public, the press and policymakers, with the history, the position and the ways to act all clear to a visitor who arrives knowing nothing. Same three jobs, different order.
Handoff: the part that decides whether the site lasts
Tribal offices and Native nonprofits see staff turnover like every small organization, and a site only one person knows how to update is a site that stops being updated. Our handoff for these projects includes a written guide for every routine task (post a notice, add a job, update a department page, change the hours), training for at least two people, a recording of that training for the next hire, and admin access held by the organization. We also set up the editor so a staff member can’t accidentally break the design; they change words and images, not layout.
If you’re inheriting a site from a previous vendor, ask for all of this before you sign off on anything new.
What to put in the RFP
If the project is grant-funded, you’re probably writing a request for proposals. The RFPs that get useful responses include:
- Who the organization is and who the site serves, including members outside the community.
- The three jobs, in your words: which services, what identity content, what accountability content.
- A content inventory of the current site, or an honest note that there isn’t one.
- Who approves, and the council dates that matter.
- The language and orthography requirement, if any.
- Accessibility requirements from your funders, if any, named specifically.
- Ownership terms: everything registered to and owned by the organization.
- Training and documentation expectations.
- The budget range and the fiscal-year or grant deadline. Vendors scope to it; hiding it wastes everyone’s time.
- Evaluation criteria that weight relevant experience and the process over the visuals in the proposal.
Frequently asked questions
What should a tribal government website include? Services (forms, contacts, departments, notices, jobs and RFPs), identity (the community’s name, language, land, history and events in its own words), and accountability (minutes, ordinances, reports). Plus a way for staff to update all of it without a developer.
Who should own a tribal organization’s website? The tribe or organization, in every respect: domain, hosting, email, admin logins and all files, registered to an organizational address. Never a vendor or an individual.
Can our website display our language correctly? Yes, if the fonts and the content system are chosen and tested for the characters your orthography uses. Ask any vendor to show you the language rendering before design begins.
Does a tribal website have to be accessible? Many federal and state funders require it, and members who are Elders or have disabilities need it regardless. Build to current accessibility guidelines from the start; it is far cheaper than fixing it later.
How long does a tribal website project take? Longer than a comparable business site, because approvals run through councils and committees and content comes from many departments. Plan the timeline around council meetings, and expect the content gathering to take as long as the design.
Start with the three jobs
If you’re planning a new site or a rebuild, write down the three jobs for your organization and who decides. That one page is the best brief a designer can receive. Send it to us along with your deadline, and we’ll tell you what we’d do with it and what it would take. Our website design work for tribal and Native organizations follows the process above, at the organization’s pace.
Bianca Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Bianca Frank Design, an Anchorage agency that has designed brands and websites for Alaska businesses since 2007. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and leads a small in-house team covering branding, web design, SEO and content strategy, with recent work for clients including Nalaquq LLC, the Native Village of Barrow, Solstice Psychiatry and Alaska Geographic. BFD was named one of Anchorage’s best web designers by Three Best Rated (2025) and received UpCity’s Local Excellence and Best of Alaska awards (2022, 2023).
