El Concilio Taíno Guatu-Ma-cu A Borikén
An organization documenting Taíno continuity in Puerto Rico since 1992. Its website had carried that story since 2008, built on technology that hadn't kept pace with the modern web. Rebuilt Spanish-first, released on the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month.
Since 1992 the Concilio has been showing that the Taíno people of Puerto Rico are still here, through DNA research, ceremony, and teaching children across the island. All of that was already written on their old website, built back in 2008. Like a lot of sites from that era, it was built before today's web standards, so the writing had become hard to read over time and the accents in their own name had stopped rendering correctly somewhere along the way. We rebuilt it in Spanish with an English option, fixed the name, and went through their photo archive to publish the pictures that show what they actually do.
Aday Interactive, Inc. contributed the time and resources for this rebuild. Our founder’s family is Puerto Rican, and Taíno heritage is a foundational part of Caribbean Hispanic identity, the part most often left out of the story.
The homepage. Every accented character renders correctly for the first time since 2008.
DNA research, on the homepage
Culture, with curated archive photography
The school program workshops
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Book a discovery callThe Story Was All There. The Page Just Hadn’t Kept Up.
This is the part worth being precise about. The 2008 site was not empty. Its mission page carried the mitochondrial DNA findings from Dr. Juan Carlos Martínez Cruzado at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, the haplogroup result, a membership of roughly 300, the towns those members come from, the 1992 founding and the 2000 incorporation.
What hadn’t kept pace was everything around the words. The site opened on a black page behind an ENTRE/ENTER doorway, a common pattern for its era. The layout ran on centered text and line breaks rather than a modern stylesheet, and the photo library held seven JPEGs. Browser standards had also moved on from the site’s original character encoding, so accents no longer rendered: the Internet Archive’s March 2025 capture, five months before we replaced it, still served the Concilio’s own name as “Concilio Ta�no Guatu-Ma-cu A Borik�n.” It had been tended over the years, with the copyright line carried to 2019 and small fixes made along the way, but the underlying technology never caught up to where the web had gone.
Rebuilt in Spanish, With the Accents Right
Spanish is the primary language now, with English as a toggle. The old site kept a separate hand-written English file for each page, which meant the two versions could quietly drift apart. One template and one language setting replaced that, so there is a single source of truth per page.
Seven pages cover history, culture, education, community, support and contact, on a documented palette drawn from Borikén: warm ivory, deep Caribbean teal, terracotta, muted gold. Inquiry forms replaced pages that had no way to reach anyone, so the school programs can actually be booked.
Then the photography. We reviewed 273 images from the organization’s own archive and published 24: ceremony at Caguana, the burén, the conuco, pottery workshops, children learning to grind. The work the Concilio actually does, finally at a size where you can see it.
The redesign
A Design System Drawn From Borikén
The old site predated the templates and design systems common on the web today, so this was a ground-up design rather than a modernization of what existed. We built the palette from the island rather than from a template: warm ivory and shell for the ground, deep Caribbean teal for structure, terracotta and muted gold for emphasis. Alegreya carries the headings, Archivo the body, which gives the Spanish its proper accents and ligatures instead of forcing it through a face designed for English.
A named palette
Ivory, shell, canopy teal, terracotta, gold. Documented, so the next person to touch the site inherits decisions rather than guesses.
Two typefaces, one job
Alegreya for display, Archivo for reading. Chosen for how they set Spanish, not how they look in English.
Seven real pages
History, culture, education, community, support and contact, replacing a doorway and a single scroll.
Built for a phone first
Most of the audience arrives on a phone. The old site was a fixed-width page from before that was true.
Findability
Making a 500-Year-Old Story Legible to Machines
A search engine could not previously tell what this organization was, where it sat, or who led it. Neither could an AI assistant asked about Taíno organizations in Puerto Rico. The rebuild describes the Concilio in the vocabulary those systems actually read, which is the same work we do for commercial clients under AI Visibility.
Identity a machine can resolve
A seven-node schema graph types the organization as an NGO with its legal name, EIN, 501(c)(3) status, founding year, full Guayanilla address, phone numbers, languages and the regions it serves.
The people, named as entities
Cacique Martín D. Veguilla and Cacique Ángel Benítez are Person nodes, not just names in a paragraph. That is how an engine learns who leads the organization.
A real place
The Centro Cultural Agüeybaná El Bravo is a Place node tied to the organization, so the Concilio has a location and not just an address string.
Bilingual, declared properly
Spanish is the default at every path and English is the same path with a language parameter, wired with canonical URLs and hreflang for Spanish, English and x-default. Both languages are in the sitemap.
Video described, not just linked
Each of the three songs and demonstrations carries VideoObject data with its title, description, upload date and language, so the recordings are findable as recordings.
Written for answer engines
An llms.txt file states the organization’s key facts in plain language for AI systems: the legal name, what Guatú Ma Cú-A Borikén translates to, the lineage of both caciques, and how the bilingual paths work.
The encoding fix matters here too, and not only visually. For eighteen years the organization’s own name was served as broken characters, which is also how every crawler and language model read it. Correct UTF-8 is the difference between being indexed as Taíno and being indexed as noise.
Support
A Page That Can Actually Take a Donation
The old site had no way to give and no way to get in touch. The new support page opens with why the work needs funding, then gets out of the way: preset amounts at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500 dollars, a field for any other number, and the 501(c)(3) status stated plainly so a donor knows the gift is deductible.
The federal EIN appears in the page data as well as the copy, so a donor can verify the organization’s nonprofit status directly on the site.
Video
The Songs, On the Page
The Concilio’s recordings had been sitting on YouTube, unlinked from the site. Three are now on the culture page: the areíto and the traditional instruments, and two songs composed by Cacique Martín Cacibaopil Veguilla, including Lamento Taíno.
They load through the privacy-preserving embed, behind a locally hosted thumbnail, so nothing calls out to a tracking domain until a visitor actually presses play. A page about ancestral ceremony should not quietly hand its readers to an advertising network.
2008 Site to Now
| 2008 site | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Photo library | Seven JPEGs, unchanged for years | 24 curated images from the archive |
| Entry | A black page behind an ENTRE/ENTER doorway | Straight to the content, seven pages |
| Layout | Centered text and line breaks, no stylesheet | A documented palette and type system |
| Accents | Collapsed (Ta�no, Borik�n) |
Correct, and checked on every page |
| Bilingual | A separate hand-written file per language | One template, one language setting |
| Forms | No way to reach anyone | School-program and contact inquiries |
What We Delivered
Collapsed accents, finally fixed
The Internet Archive’s March 2025 capture still served the name as Ta�no. Corrected here, then checked on every page and language combination.
273 reviewed, 24 published
Every file in the archive was looked at rather than sampled.
Archive rights reviewed
Every image was checked for usage rights before publishing, not just reviewed for quality.
Lighter pages, bigger pictures
Each published image ships as WebP alongside the original, so the photography got larger while the pages got lighter.
The 2008 portrait kept
The photograph of Cacike Martín D. Veguilla that opened the old site is still on the About page. Provenance outranks pixels.
A real way to give
Preset amounts, the federal EIN, and the 501(c)(3) status stated plainly, so a donor can act without stopping to ask questions.
Services
- Legacy site rebuild
- Design system and art direction
- Bilingual architecture (Spanish-first, English toggle)
- Schema and entity markup for AI visibility
- Technical SEO: canonical URLs, hreflang, sitemap, robots
- Answer-engine groundwork (llms.txt)
- Donation page and inquiry forms
- Video integration with privacy-preserving embeds
- Localization QA
- Photo curation and rights screening
- Image optimization
- Deployment runbook and documentation
Tech Stack
What this engagement used
The Same Work, Available to Your Firm
Each of these is a standing service, not something invented for one project. Follow any of them to see how the engagement is scoped and priced.
Legacy Site Rebuild
Bringing a long-serving legacy site forward for the modern web, without losing what it held.
Bilingual Architecture
One template serving two languages, with hreflang and canonical handling.
AI Visibility
Schema, entity and answer-engine work so the organization is findable by name.
Next step
Let’s talk about your project
A 30 minute discovery call with Brandon. We look at what you have now, what is in the way, and whether this is work we should take on together.
- A straight read on what is actually holding the work back
- What an engagement would involve, in scope and in sequence
- An honest answer if we are not the right fit
No charge, no obligation, and no pitch deck. If a call is not the right next step, say so and we will send something useful instead.
FAQ: Concilio Taíno Rebuild
What did Aday Interactive, Inc. build for El Concilio Taíno Guatu-Ma-cu A Borikén?
Aday Interactive, Inc. rebuilt the organization's website from the ground up. The previous site, built in 2008, carried the organization's history and research for nearly two decades, but its styling and character encoding predated standards the modern web now runs on, which made that material hard to read. The new site is a seven-page, Spanish-first bilingual build on a documented design system, with working inquiry forms for the school programs and a curated photo library drawn from the organization's own archive.
Why did the organization's name not display correctly for eighteen years?
The 2008 site predated the character-encoding conventions that became universal later, so accented characters never rendered correctly, including in the organization's own name, which appeared on its homepage as "Concilio Ta?no Guatu-Ma-cu A Borik?n." The rebuild is UTF-8 throughout and every page and language combination was verified by hand, so the Spanish renders correctly for the first time since the original site went up.
How does the site handle Spanish and English?
Spanish is the primary language and English is a toggle. The 2008 site kept two hand-maintained copies of every page, which meant the two languages could drift apart over time. The rebuild renders one template driven by a single session variable, so there is one source of truth per page and the two languages cannot diverge.
What was involved in the photography work?
The old site carried seven JPEGs in total, the same files it had been serving for years. We reviewed 273 images from the organization's archive, published 24, and shipped each as WebP alongside the original. A standard usage-rights review was part of that process, as it is on any archive of this size.
Was this a paid engagement?
No. Aday Interactive, Inc. contributed the time and resources for this rebuild. Our founder's family is Puerto Rican, and Taíno heritage is a foundational part of Caribbean Hispanic identity, the part most often left out of the story. The site launched on September 15, 2026, the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month.
Can Aday Interactive, Inc. rebuild a legacy website for my organization?
Yes. Legacy site rebuilds, bilingual architecture, localization QA, and image optimization are all standard services. The work shown here is the same process we run on commercial engagements, and our <a href="/custom-web-saas">Custom Web and SaaS</a> practice covers it.