Fifteen Years and Counting

Hello again! Hope you’re having a pleasant day.

Miranj turned fifteen in February. 🎂

It felt like the kind of milestone that deserved more than a quiet acknowledgement — and as good a reason as any to do something we’ve been meaning to do for a while: write to you again. Because yes, it has been nearly four years since our last newsletter. We have no grand excuse for the silence. Life happened, work happened, the newsletter kept getting bumped.

The world hasn’t stood still in the meantime. There’s a geopolitical and economic turbulence that seems to have become the unsettling new normal. Many of us carry a low hum of anxiety through our days, and we hope you and yours are navigating it as well as can be.

And then there’s AI — which has gone from fancy demos to nearly ubiquitous presence in the life of almost every knowledge worker, ourselves included. More on that shortly.

Here’s everything that’s been afoot at Miranj since we last wrote.

🦋 A Renewed Sense of Purpose

If you’ve known us since the 2010s, you may have noticed the new logo and a fresh coat of paint.

A decade of work brought a certain clarity about what we do best and what we value most: we’re not just a studio that builds websites — we’re long-term thinking partners for organising and publishing stories on the web. Our most fulfilling engagements haven’t been one-off projects but ongoing relationships where we help clients plan carefully, make sound decisions, and solve problems as they evolve. When that happens, the website tends to last — some of our projects have been live for 5–7 years, some for over 10, which is something we’re quietly proud of.

This brought us to our north star: enabling clients to communicate meaningfully on the web and preserving that knowledge over the long term.

Designer, artist, and friend Kriti Monga translated this energy into a brand, and our friend (and designer) Tejas helped out with the typefaces. Our refreshed website and brand were soft-launched in February 2023.

Our work page now closely tracks how long each project has been live since launch. 

🛠️ New Work

We worked on dozens of projects; to highlight a few:

1. The Nehru Archive — A digital archive of India’s first Prime Minister, launched with over 35,000 artefacts (letters, speeches, parliamentary debates, diary entries, etc.) and 3,000 visuals (photographs, cartoons and maps) covering 61 years of Nehru’s life, from 1903 to 1964. We charted out the product strategy and undertook the technical development alongside Oijo (who anchored the project) and Now Form (who led visual design). The archive went live on November 14, 2025 — Nehru’s birth anniversary, and exactly on the promised date.
   🔗 nehru​archive​.in

2. CEPT University — Established in the 1960s by the renowned architect BV Doshi, CEPT has a rich legacy and significant influence on the field of architecture in India. Today it offers programs across design, planning, management, and technology in addition to its storied school of architecture. We led strategy, information architecture, and technical development alongside 3 Sided Coin, who led visual design.
   🔗 cept​.ac​.in

3. Two global non-profit alliances:

   ICBL-CMC & The Monitor — A Nobel Peace Prize–winning international campaign to ban landmines, cluster munitions, and other indiscriminate weapons. Struggling with a JavaScript-heavy, slow, hard-to-edit React setup, we stepped in to audit their system, rebuilt their front-end architecture, and significantly improved editorial flexibility.
   🔗 icblcmc​.org 🔗 the​-mon​i​tor​.org

   MenEngage Alliance — A global network of non-profit organisations working with men and boys towards gender rights and gender justice for all. We migrated them off WordPress and built a multilingual website (English, French, and Spanish), ensuring accessibility across a network spanning five continents. The refreshed website was designed by Hamsa.
   🔗 menen​gage​.org

We’ve also worked on sites for two Gates Foundation-supported research studies: digital lives of women in Africa, and health-seeking experiences of vulnerable populations, a South Asian literature and art publication called Daak Vaak, India’s founder-friendly venture capitalist Blume, a development consultancy for conflict regions, a UN-backed victim database of the Khmer Rouge genocide, a law office, and much more!

🌱 New Services & Offerings

Our north star — meaningful communication and long-term preservation of knowledge — has made us re-evaluate what we do (and what we don’t). Content websites don’t just get built; they need tending to. In recent years, we’ve expanded beyond strategy workshops and design/​development to formalise new services:

New Hosting & Support Packages

We’ve moved away from ad hoc, hour-based billing to structured, proactive packages: Glide 🪂, Cruise ✈️, and Boost 🚀. Each one is built around a different kind of client need, offering reliable hosting, predictable pricing, reduced administrative overhead, and the assurance that someone’s got their back — what we’ve started calling Peace of Mind™.

Project Adoption

We step in to help organisations struggling with specific aspects like performance, SEO, ease of use, or content flexibility of their existing websites — but not looking to abandon their entire investment merely to address the pain points. We audit the existing system, migrate it to a proven, fast, and robust technical stack, and take over ongoing hosting and support under our support packages (e.g. Valueimpakt, ICBL-CMC, Angkor Database, and MAADS Hotels). If you know someone struggling with website upkeep, we’d be glad to have a conversation.

Static Archival

We generate permanent static snapshots of content-heavy websites approaching end-of-life. Born out of our belief that websites are public knowledge resources that shouldn’t be erased from the internet’s memory, we built a tool and a workflow to preserve a site’s content long after the servers go dark. Some of our client sites — Internet Democracy Project, Obvious, IndiaBioscience forums and Project ARC — have been archived this way. This works for any server-side rendered website, regardless of backend or CMS.

🎙️ Talks

We’ve had a few opportunities to share our thinking beyond client work.

1. Demystifying the Craft CMS API for Twig Developers — Prateek explores how to tap into the full power of Craft and Yii APIs to write more efficient, reliable, and performant Twig templates.
   Dot All 2023, Barcelona

2. Breaking News on the Web — Souvik shared tips and suggestions for building modern news sites for a cohort of news startups from the APAC region.
   Lighthouse Mentorship Session, May 2024

3. Packaging Peace of Mind for Your Clients — Souvik traced our journey from a maker’s mindset to a caregiver’s mindset, and how we rethought our support offerings along the way.
   Dot All 2025, Lisbon

4. Generating End-of-Life Static Archives of CMS-Based Websites — Prateek demonstrated the tool we built to preserve websites when they retire.
   Dot All 2025, Lisbon

🧑‍💻 The Team

Our team strength has hovered around 5 people for the last few years, but there have been some new faces, and some goodbyes:

• Rishi joined in December 2023 from Mumbai, and looks after Project Management. He is our resident expert on software tools — always the first to find a new app, workflow, or piece of technology that makes the rest of us slightly embarrassed we hadn’t discovered it first.
• Preethi joined in May 2025 as a web developer. She lives on the outskirts of Chennai, where she leads a considered, unhurried life — which belies just how much she manages to do, including homeschooling her daughter.

Divya, Kavya, and Paul — each of whom played a meaningful part in the Miranj story — have moved on to new things. We’re grateful for the time we had working alongside them, and we wish them well.

We managed to get the entire team together — once in Thailand, and last year in Goa — for some much-needed face time. Both trips gave us room to step back, think about where Miranj is headed, and enjoy each other’s company without a screen in the way.

Hua Hin, Thailand and Goa, India. 

Founder Updates

Prateek has relocated to Delft, the Netherlands 🇳🇱, to accompany his partner, who is studying there. We do miss him being reachable at more reasonable hours. And Souvik welcomed a daughter 👶 in late 2024, who is now an occasional participant in team calls — both a bundle of joy and a distraction.

🤖 AI & Our Work

We’d be writing a strange newsletter if we didn’t address the elephant in the room.

Honestly? We’ve been sceptical and a bit slow to adopt. The noise has been overwhelming, and a fair amount of it has felt like hype. But AI is undeniably here — it’s changing how knowledge work gets done, and we’ve started finding our footing, cautiously but genuinely. There’s still a way to go.

In the meantime, one question we’ve been sitting with is particularly relevant to our line of work: how do you make your website visible to AI? Just as SEO shaped how we built websites for search engines over the past two decades, a new discipline is quietly forming around making content readable and discoverable by LLMs. The Making your site visible to LLMs piece from Evil Martians is one of the clearest summaries of the current state of affairs. The Craft community has already started responding: the LLM Ready plugin automatically serves clean Markdown versions of your content to AI crawlers. Worth keeping an eye on how this space develops.

🤝 Let’s Talk

We’re on the lookout for interesting web projects and collaborations. Do email hidden; JavaScript is required if you (or anyone around) would like help with web strategy, design, or development.

We’re also passively looking for someone to assist us in managing dozens of servers, hosting tools and other DevOps tasks — likely a part-time engagement. If that sounds like you or someone you know, we’d love to hear from you.

It’s good to be back in your inbox. Do write to us — we’d genuinely love to hear how you’ve been.

— From all of us at Miranj
Miranj is Anita, Prateek, Preethi, Rishi, and Souvik.