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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