Case Study — Mithril International
A site that holds up under the same scrutiny as the advice
Mithril International is a boutique cross-border tax and corporate services advisory, serving owner-managers across the Americas from offices in Bridgetown, Halifax, and Miami. Its clients hire it for discretion and precision — so its website had to carry both. We designed and built the firm's marketing site end to end, launching in June 2026.
0
Third-party font CDN calls — fonts are self-hosted for privacy and speed
WCAG 2.1 AA
Accessibility work, keyboard-first — verifiable in the commit history
~60%
Lighter imagery across the site — roughly 12.5MB down to 4.9MB
11
Insight articles at launch — ten ported with original URLs intact, one new
The challenge
In cross-border advisory, credibility is the product. Before an owner-manager trusts a firm with structuring that spans jurisdictions, they look closely at everything the firm puts its name on — and the website is usually the first thing they find. It had to feel like the advice: quiet, exact, expensive in the right way.
That standard could not stop at the surface. The engineering underneath — the accessibility of the navigation, the security headers, the way an inquiry actually reaches the advisory team — had to hold up under an inspection nobody sees, because in this sector, somebody eventually does.
And the firm was not starting from silence. Its Insights library — eleven articles of published thinking — already existed on the previous site, linked from elsewhere. Moving house could not break a single one of those inbound links.
The approach
A brand system before a single page
The visual system came first: a locked seven-colour token palette — deep charcoal and black surfaces, warm white, and a signature amber accent — with serif display type paired against a clean sans for body copy, and square corners throughout. Dark, premium, editorial. The fonts are self-hosted, so no page calls a third-party font CDN — good for privacy and good for speed. That system then carried consistently across eleven content routes plus a dynamic article route — from home, services, and why-Mithril through the concierge and private-client pages to the Insights library and the legal pages — with nine service areas presented, including a rotating service showcase on the home page.
An inquiry pipeline treated like the product
For a firm like this, the contact form is the front desk, so it was built like it matters. The form is structured — inquiry type, residence, service interests, jurisdictions — and validated on both client and server. A honeypot field and per-IP rate limiting keep it clean. Submissions deliver straight to the advisory team's inboxes via an email API, with a graceful fallback to direct email if delivery is ever unavailable — an inquiry from the right client should never disappear into a broken form. For those who prefer chat, a floating WhatsApp button offers a second route in.
Accessibility as table stakes
The WCAG 2.1 AA work runs through the whole build, and every piece of it is verifiable in the commit history: full keyboard support for the desktop mega menu — arrow keys, Enter, Space, Escape — a mobile drawer with a focus trap and proper modal semantics, a skip-to-content link, labelled form fields with per-field error announcements, colour-contrast fixes across CTAs, footer, and eyebrow text to AA ratios, mobile tap targets around 44px, and animations that respect prefers-reduced-motion.
The engineering nobody sees
The site ships a full security-header suite: HSTS with a two-year, preload-eligible policy, a Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options set to DENY, a restrictive Permissions-Policy, a Referrer-Policy, and nosniff — alongside the inquiry form's honeypot and rate limiting. Performance got the same quiet attention: site imagery was optimised from roughly 12.5MB to 4.9MB — about 60% lighter — landing photos were converted to WebP, and the hero image is prioritised for fast first paint. Underneath it all is a modern server-rendered React stack on managed edge hosting with auto-deploys, and privacy-conscious, cookie-light analytics added at launch.
Nothing lost in the move
The firm's eleven-article Insights library lives on the new site: ten articles ported from the previous site with their original URLs and slugs preserved — so existing inbound links keep working — plus one new article published at launch. Discoverability was finished properly too: a complete sitemap with per-URL lastmod, canonical URLs on every page, Organization, ProfessionalService, and per-article structured data, and per-page titles, descriptions, and designed social-share images.
The results
- —Brand system, design, build, content migration, and inquiry pipeline — delivered end to end and live June 2026, with a “Built by Teralith Incorporated” credit in the footer.
- —A bespoke editorial brand system: a locked seven-colour token palette, serif display over a clean sans, self-hosted fonts with no third-party font CDN calls, square corners throughout.
- —Eleven insight articles live at launch — ten ported with their original URLs preserved, one new — so existing inbound links keep working.
- —WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility work throughout: keyboard-first navigation, a focus-trapped mobile drawer, AA contrast ratios, and per-field error announcements — all verifiable in the commit history.
- —A full security-header suite — preload-eligible HSTS, Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options DENY, restrictive Permissions-Policy — plus a honeypot and per-IP rate limiting on the inquiry form.
- —A structured inquiry pipeline delivering straight to the advisory team’s inboxes, with a graceful direct-email fallback and a floating WhatsApp option.
- —Site imagery about 60% lighter — roughly 12.5MB down to 4.9MB — with landing photos in WebP and the hero image prioritised for fast first paint.
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