Te Pūnaha Matatini is the home of complex systems research in Aotearoa New Zealand. They reveal the patterns and dynamics shaping our world, and grow ethical, collaborative experts equipped to address our most pressing challenges
Te Pūnaha Matatini
The challenge
Te Pūnaha Matatini (TPM) is a Centre of Research Excellence, but the website hadn't kept up with their amazing mahi. Built in WordPress with the Divi page builder, editing content had become a chore. The site lacked any real structure beyond pages and posts, which made relating and reusing content nearly impossible.
With more than 500 pieces of content spread across blog posts, team members, projects, resources, partners and conferences, TPM needed something that could handle that complexity, both for editors and for visitors trying to find their way around.
The approach
Working alongside the brand and design team at Toi Āria, we led the UX wireframing and built the new site on Statamic. The brief was clear: showcase the centre's research impact, improve traffic and visitor experience, communicate outputs to funders, and better acknowledge the collaborators behind every piece of work.
That meant designing a content architecture where the relationships between content types were the point, not an afterthought.
What we built
The design work, icons and patterns and strong typeface driven design created by Jean, Anna and the Toi Āria team produce a striking website design.
The site is built around seven connected content types with two-way relationships throughout:
350+ blog posts (and growing)
120+ team members
25+ projects
25+ resources
15+ partners and funders
Conferences
25+ pages
The new site is built around relationships, not pages. Update a researcher's profile once and it appears wherever they're referenced, across projects, posts and conference speaker lists. The editing team finally has the single source of truth their work needed.
All 500+ pieces of content from the old site moved across with search rankings intact. Features like the custom symposium schedule, fully mobile-friendly, lets the team manage academic events themselves rather than coming back to us for changes.
The outcome
The site launched in late 2025. Performance improved meaningfully, and the editing team's relationship with the site changed completely (Jonathan's testimonial below captures it best).
We're still hosting and looking after the site, and continuing to build new functionality as TPM's work evolves.
“The presentation of the site comes with such an outstanding clarity that it underpins beautifully a key message we want to pursue: the world is naturally complex, but there are approaches and tools to bring clarity to this and move from complexity to possibility!”
Acknowledgements
The design was created by Jean, Anna and the fantastic team at Toi Āria, who brought TPM's brand to life with strong typography, custom icons and patterns. Type design by NZ studio KLIM. The whole project was coordinated by Jonathan Burgess at TPM.
A true combined team effort, yeilding great results.
Jonathan Burgess
Communications and Marketing Senior Adviser - Auckland University
Migrating our website from WordPress to Statamic was a dream come true. Having our website in a flat file means that it loads like lightning and is extremely secure. The editor is extremely intuitive to work with and delivers all the functionality that we need.
Part of the dream coming true was achieving single sources of truth for content that can be populated throughout the site and updated in one place. If our director grows a moustache, we can now update their photo everywhere from one place.
We’re a research centre, and the ability to quickly and easily crosslink team members, resources, posts and projects throughout the site has revolutionised both the frontend of our website and the editing experience.
Statamic is the CMS of the future, with none of the baggage of the past.
