A large marketing site the client could run, but couldn't break

Artesian Solutions is a B2B company-intelligence platform. Its whole pitch is helping salespeople understand the companies they sell to, so the marketing site had to speak to a lot of different people at once: new business sellers, account managers, sales leaders, marketers and CXOs, each with their own reason to care. That made for a big site, with over twenty page templates, an audience tree several levels deep, plus resources, events, case studies and an academy.

Supremo designed, built and ran it, and stayed the client's web partner for several years. I came onto it as the designer and frontend developer, working to a brand that already existed under the direction of Supremo's creative director, with the technical director on the WordPress side. The site was built as a set of fixed templates. The client could log in and change the content and the assets on any page, but not the layout. The client owned the content. We owned the structure.

Artesian was always in motion, adding audiences, campaigns, events and case studies. If every one of those meant a developer editing a template by hand, the site would either fall behind or fill up with small breakages. The marketing team needed to run it themselves.

The catch is that giving a non-technical team a free hand over a large site is how large sites drift. Fonts wander, spacing collapses, a hero gets pasted where a feature grid should be, and the brand you built erodes one edit at a time. So for each template we exposed only the fields that were safe to change, the headline, the copy, the images and the links. Everything structural stayed fixed.

That decision set the discipline for the whole project. Because the layout couldn't be rearranged after build, the design had to be right before a line of it was built. A template signed off loosely was one we would be fighting for years. So sign-off came first, every time, and the build followed a design nobody could move.

The site was too big to design in one pass, so it was built the way it was run: one section at a time. A section started as a brief and a desired outcome from the client. We took that, worked out what the section actually needed to be, and came back with a wireframe, often a few variations, for the marketing manager to react to before any design happened. Design followed the same loop. We showed the work, took the feedback, actioned it, and only built once it was signed off.

Content was rarely ready when we needed it. Instead of letting that stall a page, we wireframed the section blocks to the shape the content would take, agreed the structure, and let the real copy and assets drop in later. It kept the site moving even when the words were still being written.

The requests came through every channel a client has: briefs, emails, Basecamp threads, and a Lighthouse queue for the smaller changes. Early on I was designing and building to the creative director's direction. As the project went on I took on more of it, more of the design, more of the frontend, and more of the direct back-and-forth with the client, while the work was still signed off internally before it ever reached them.

What shipped was one system doing the work of a much bigger site. Over twenty templates covered the whole thing, the homepage, the audience pages for each sales role, the What is Artesian explainers, social selling, resources, case studies, events, the academy and the about pages. Change the fields, keep the frame, and every page stayed on brand no matter who published it.

I hand-built the frontend in the WordPress theme, the templates, the styling and the interactions, in PHP, SCSS and JavaScript, working from the signed-off designs so the built page matched the design exactly. The editing itself ran on a fields-based setup, where each template surfaced its editable content as a list of fields for the client to fill. It was the mechanism that made a site this size manageable by a team that didn't write code.

The system did its job. The client ran their own marketing site on it, publishing and updating across all of those templates without coming back to us for the routine work. What did come back came as new sections and new campaigns, the kind of growth the template approach was built to absorb. The site is no longer live, but it ran as Artesian's marketing platform for the length of the partnership.

The honest limitation is in how the editing worked. A fields-based template is safe, but it is rigid. If the client wanted a new kind of block inside an existing page, there was no clean way to slot it in themselves. Some pages leaned on shortcodes pasted into a rich-text field to get around it, and those were never friendly to use. It was the best answer we had at the time, on the tools we had at the time.

Built today, I would keep the principle and change the mechanism. I would build it block by block, where each block is a designed, locked component the client composes from a library. That gives them the freedom to add and reorder sections while every block stays on brand, and it designs out the shortcode workarounds entirely.