Handing the marketing team complete control, without calling a developer

CENTURY is an ed-tech platform that uses AI to build adaptive learning paths for students and assessment data for teachers. Its website had been reworked so many times by so many different developers that the WordPress build underneath had gone glitchy and become almost impossible to change. A new marketing team had inherited it and wanted a rebuild, but the rebuild was only the surface of it. What they actually needed was to run their own site, to build, A/B test and change landing pages for every audience they sold to, at campaign speed, without a developer in the loop.

The approach we took was module-first. Instead of designing pages, we designed a set of branded modules, and every page became an assembly of them. That decision is what made the rest possible, and it is what became Cohort, the page builder we built into their WordPress.

The work started in CENTURY's London office. The first session, run by Supremo's creative director with me as the lead designer and developer, was a deep dive into everything they wanted from the partnership, and its job was to turn that into a sitemap and a set of module requirements. We mapped the whole company onto a wall, a global navigation at the top, then an audience funnel splitting Schools into primary, secondary, independent, international and alternative provision, alongside FE colleges, government, parents and investors. Every one of those needed its own page and its own message.

What came out of it was a kit of parts. The same handful of content blocks kept reappearing across every audience, what CENTURY is, how it works, platform features, use cases, testimonials. We listed the modules a page might need and the variations of each, three ways to run a video, a long-form content layout, a masonry media wall. That inventory was never on the brief, and it is what made the scale of the site manageable.

The brief asked for a new website. The real problem sat underneath it. CENTURY is a scale-up that changes constantly, breaking into new markets and launching new ventures, and every change meant a developer editing a fragile WordPress template by hand. Marketing could not ship a campaign, test a landing page or add a section without joining a technical queue. A prettier static site would have hit the same wall a month after launch.

So the real design problem was the system that let a non-technical marketer build any page they needed, on brand, without touching code. The module-first approach answered both halves at once. The modules gave every audience a tailored page, and those same modules, handed to the marketing team, became the tool they ran the whole site with.

The sequence followed the model. We defined the module set first, wireframed every page as an assembly of those modules, then designed and built from there. I wireframed the full site, homepage through to every audience page, the knowledge base, news and testimonials, so the structure was settled before anything got styled.

Supremo's technical director built Cohort's core, the engine that turned the modules into an editable page builder inside WordPress. My side was the design and the usability. The core was powerful, but it had to be something a non-technical marketer could pick up and use, so the UX of the editor was mine to get right. I designed the UI for every module and how it behaved while someone was editing it, then wired those designs into the WordPress PHP templates so the page a marketer assembled matched the page that shipped. Once the base was working I built components alongside it. The frontend was a big part of the job, and I hand-built all of it in vanilla HTML and PHP, SCSS and JavaScript, from the module templates and micro-interactions to a homepage hero driven by a full GSAP timeline.

What shipped was a site with no bespoke pages in it. Every page, from the homepage to each audience journey, was built from the same branded module set: heroes, feature grids, the long-form layout, video modules in three variations, a masonry media wall for testimonials and press. Change the content, keep the system, and the site stays coherent no matter who assembles it.

The product itself is dense, screens full of data that mean a lot to a teacher and little to a first-time visitor. So instead of filling the site with screenshots of the platform, I told the story of each feature through motion. I made a set of short animated videos that walk through the key feature journeys, diagnostics, recommended pathways, automated marking, the teacher dashboard, each one simplifying what the platform does into something you grasp in a few seconds, plus the icon set that runs alongside them. Because I built the frontend as well, that motion went live exactly as designed, sitting inside Cohort's modules so the marketing team could place it on any page.

There is no headline metric on this one, and it doesn't need one. The site shipped, and it gave the marketing team what they had asked for, the ability to run their own campaigns and build their own pages without a developer in the way. Both co-heads of marketing recorded a video about the difference Cohort made to how they work.

We stayed their partner for about three years after launch, maintaining the site and Cohort and building new modules as the business needed them, until we moved on to bigger projects and handed the work over to another agency. The site is still live today, still managed for the marketing team and taken in a slightly new direction since, but modules and styling we built are still in place.