Bal Harbour, Miami

The Village of Bal Harbour required a single web platform capable of serving two distinct audiences with very different needs. The tourism site (balharbourflorida.com) targets visitors seeking hotels, restaurants, and events, including a large Brazilian Portuguese-speaking audience. The government site (balharbourfl.gov) serves residents with access to municipal services, staff directories, departments, and job postings.

Architecture

The solution was a WordPress Multisite installation hosted on Pantheon, using a parent/child theme architecture to maximize code reuse while allowing each site to maintain its own identity and functionality.

The parent theme establishes the shared design system and frontend framework, built with Bootstrap 5 and a Webpack build pipeline supporting SCSS, Babel, and PostCSS. It handles navigation patterns, responsive layouts, custom image sizes, and ACF block registration.

Two child themes extend the parent:

• Visitors Site — Focused on tourism content, with custom post types for hotels, restaurants, press coverage, press releases, fact sheets, and visitor events. The site includes Brazilian Portuguese translation support and media-rich layouts using Slick Carousel.
• Residents Site — Designed as a municipal portal, featuring custom post types for staff directories, departments, resident events, and job listings, along with an alert bar system for village announcements.

Functionality is further modularized through custom plugins that register content types and shared taxonomies across the network.

Outcome

This architecture provides a single maintainable codebase while supporting two specialized sites. Shared infrastructure and deployment workflows reduce maintenance overhead while preserving flexibility for future expansion.