Full site and self-service CMS for a Manchester agency
An eleven-page agency site built fast and lean, with a content system the founder publishes through himself. No developer in the loop for day-to-day changes.
A Manchester digital agency needed its own site to hold up against the standard it sells. It also needed the founder, a non-technical marketer, to be able to publish articles, case studies and service changes himself without raising a ticket every time.
Agency sites carry a particular burden: the site is the pitch. Slow, bloated or template-shaped would undercut every conversation the founder walks into.
Built as a static site on a modern framework: eleven pages, self-hosted fonts, security headers, and a total first paint under 60KB gzipped with zero JavaScript on the launch page. Fast because there is nothing to be slow.
A Git-based content system sits on top, so the founder writes and publishes through a browser with one login. Uploaded images route automatically through an image CDN, so a phone photo dropped into a post is served as an optimised web image without anyone thinking about it.
The build shipped with structured data on articles, a full metadata and social-preview system, an RSS feed for syndication, and a handover manual written in plain English.
The site went live with performance most agencies quote for but rarely ship, and the client publishes his own content: posts written, illustrated and published with no developer involved.
The pattern built here, static framework plus Git-based CMS plus automated image pipeline, is now the standard approach I bring to client web builds.