Nieman-Vonteray — the website and the wiring

The brief

Nieman-Vonteray is a 26-year-old management consultancy that sells clarity — and had outgrown both of its faces. The public website was a template older than some of its associates: no practice pages, no way to brief the firm without a phone call, and a "client login" that led nowhere. Meanwhile the office network behind the polished boardroom was held together with unlabeled patch cables, an end-of-life firewall, and a UPS that held four minutes instead of thirty.

The managing partner put it plainly: "We advise on infrastructure risk and our own office is the case study in what not to do." They wanted one engagement to fix both — and one person to carry the can for both.

The website

The new site is quiet on purpose — a serif-led, brass-accented design that reads like the firm's written work rather than shouting over it. Six practice pages, sector pages, partner bios and an insights section, hand-built and fast. The pointless client-login button became a real engagement funnel: a first-conversation request that lands directly with a partner.

• Six practice & sector pages — written to read like the firm advises: short, specific, no slideware tone.
• Editorial typography — Fraunces serif display with Inter for body; the site looks like a well-set memorandum, not a template.
• Engagement funnel — "Bring us the decision you keep deferring" — a CTA that filters for the clients the firm actually wants.
• Sub-second loads — static build, two font families, no frameworks; loads fast on hotel Wi-Fi where partners actually read it.

The network refresh

Before touching a cable, I ran a three-day structured audit and logged every finding in a tracker the client partner could read — severity, location, status, cost. Fourteen findings, two critical: a perimeter firewall out of vendor support, and UPS batteries that would not have carried the file server through a brownout. Both were hardware buys, approved within the week.

• Cabling audit & relabel — 96 ports documented, 31 previously unknown; every run above the ceiling re-clipped to code.
• Firewall replacement — EoL unit swapped during the zero-hours weekend window; policies migrated and tested before Monday.
• VLAN segmentation — guest Wi-Fi no longer bridges the office LAN; staff, guests and printers live on separate segments with firewall rules between.
• UPS replacement & load test — batteries swapped, full-load holdup verified at 34 minutes.
• Off-site backup — the shared drive's local-only backup gained a verified off-site copy; restore tested, not assumed.
• Firmware remediation — two switches on vulnerable firmware patched in-place during working hours, no outage.
• Remote support tooling — secured remote access for ongoing support, so most fixes now happen before anyone drives downtown.

The result

Six weeks from brief to cutover. The weekend switchover finished ahead of schedule — firewall, UPS and VLANs all live by Saturday evening — and Monday morning opened with zero support tickets. The new site launched the same week, and the first engagement enquiry through it came from exactly the kind of client the firm had been trying to reach. The consultancy now advises on infrastructure risk from an office whose infrastructure they no longer worry about.