Case study
A brochure site that the marketing team can actually operate.
The failure mode for an agency-built marketing site is not that it looks wrong on launch day. It is that eighteen months later every page is stale, because changing anything requires a developer and a deployment.
01 / The problem
What was actually hard.
Hand-built marketing sites decay predictably. A service is dropped, a price changes, a case study is added — and each of those becomes a ticket. The client stops raising them, the site drifts away from the business, and eventually gets rebuilt rather than maintained.
The opposite failure is just as common: hand the client a general-purpose page builder and the design system dissolves within a quarter. What is wanted is a narrow editing surface — enough control to keep content current, not enough to break the layout.
02 / What we built
The system.
- Content-managed structure
- Services, industries, technology pages and posts as first-class records with their own routes, so adding one is an editorial action rather than a deployment.
- A deliberately narrow admin
- Dashboard, services, posts, testimonials, settings and enquiries — and nothing else. The editor can change what the page says, not how it is built.
- Enquiries as a workflow, not an email
- Submissions stored, listed, opened and markable as replied, so nothing sits unanswered in a shared inbox with no record of who handled it.
- Settings rather than hard-coded values
- Contact details, and the fragments that appear across every page, held in configuration so a phone number changes in one place.
- Legal pages under one route
- Policies handled through a single pattern rather than as bespoke templates, so adding one is trivial and they cannot drift apart in styling.
03 / What carried over
Decisions worth reusing.
The parts of this build that we would apply again on a different problem in a different sector.
- Narrow the editing surface on purpose
- The right amount of CMS is the least that keeps content current. Every extra degree of freedom is a way for the design system to be undone later.
- Enquiries deserve state
- The moment a form emails a shared inbox, follow-up depends on somebody's memory. Giving a lead a status is a small change with a disproportionate effect.
- Content that outlives the launch
- A site is not finished when it ships. It is finished when the people who own it can keep it true without calling anyone.
04 / More work
Other builds.
Different sectors, the same delivery discipline.
Bits N Pixels
A software consultancy's site rebuilt as a platform — CMS, client portal, invoicing and multi-gateway payment links, with no CSS framework anywhere.
Encore Episode
A vertically-integrated event commerce platform — ticketing, gate control, cashless payments and vendor settlement in one system.
eSign Platform
An e-signature platform with envelopes, templates, a REST API and a tamper-evident certificate of completion behind every signed document.
Next step
Have something like this to build?
Start with a diagnostic. It is fixed-fee, time-boxed, and it will tell you honestly whether the thing is worth building — including when the answer is no.