Silent Forge Technologies
A marketing site the client's team can run without a developer
A production marketing site for an engineering company with eight distinct product lines. Built so a non-technical team can add and edit everything themselves through a CMS, with no developer in the loop.
- Role
- Sole developer: build, CMS modelling, client handover
The problem
The client had a genuine constraint: nobody on their team writes code. They asked for an admin panel to manage the site, which is usually where a project quietly turns into building and maintaining a bespoke CMS, a cost the client would carry forever.
The approach
01
Do not build the admin panel
Sanity Studio already is the admin panel. Rather than building custom CRUD screens, I modelled their content properly in Sanity and handed them the Studio. The correct move was recognising that the thing they asked for already existed.
02
Migrate content out of the code
Everything the team might reasonably want to change (product lines, team bios, headshots, copy, tab ordering) moved from hardcoded components into the CMS. Each migration removed a future support request.
03
Draw the line honestly
Page layout and brand-new section types stay developer work, and I told them so. Pretending a CMS can safely absorb layout decisions is how these projects degrade into unmaintainable template soup.
How it turned out
- Live, with the client's team self-serving content changes.
- Eight product lines managed entirely through the CMS, added and reordered by the client without code changes.
- Documented editing guide handed over so the knowledge does not live only with me.
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