newstore.com, a design team that ships production code.
- Kind
- B2B marketing site
- Commits
- 1,000
- Stack
- Next.js, Payload
- Agency involved
- None
The whole company website, designed and coded by the design team.
Not a redesign handed to an agency. Eight months from a discovery workshop to launch, with the design team writing the production code: the homepage, the solution pages, the platform pages, the blog and the migration. About a thousand commits, no agency.
It did not start as a design project.
The old site ran on a WordPress stack nearly ten years old. It fell to a widespread attack on our host, and the backups could not be restored. Alongside that: an inconsistent mix of 2018 and 2023 pages, a story page that stopped in 2022, one call to action on the whole site, and no view of what any of it converted.
So the question was not whether to redesign. It was whether to hand it to an agency or build it ourselves. We built it ourselves.
“This site should not answer every question. It should make someone want to ask them.”
Eight months
- FebDiscovery workshop. Audiences, what was broken, what success would look like.
- Mar to AprSitemap workshop. Nine competing sitemaps converged into one structure.
- MayContent briefs from marketing, then wireframes as a clickable prototype.
- Jun to JulBuild. Homepage, solution pages, the Platform and Agentic pages.
- Jul to SepMigrate and polish. Blog and resources moved, copy reviewed, SEO.
- OctSecurity testing and hardening, then launch on 9 October.
I built a Design Lab instead of mocking up five directions.
Choosing a visual direction usually means a designer making five comps on invented content, and everyone arguing about the one they can picture best. So I built a configurator instead: preset directions, brand gradients, accent colour and intensity, background motifs, all rendering live on the real pages, with the real copy.
The team stopped debating taste and started looking at the actual site.
What launched
A design team, writing the code.
Wireframes became a clickable prototype, so we could browse the story before designing it. Then the build itself, on one shared design system. A thousand commits, none of them from an agency.
- Hosting
- Vercel, separate production and sandbox
- App
- Next.js
- CMS
- Payload, marketing edits content directly
- Data
- Neon Postgres, Blob storage for media
- Pipeline
- GitLab CI, tests and deploys
- Edge
- WAF and attack alerts
- Languages
- English and German, expandable