Content management systems

Why we build headless

A traditional CMS ties content to the theme that displays it. The theme decides what a page can hold, plugins pile up, and in time the platform becomes the reason a team cannot do something. Classroom Champions' Webflow site had collected so many plugins and dependencies that routine edits risked breaking it. We build headless instead, so content lives in a structured backend and the front end is built separately to whatever the design needs.

Sanity is our default. It stores content as structured data, keeps the schema in code, and gives us an editing Studio we can shape to each team. We have also built on Payload for Strata Capital Partners and the University of Calgary, and on Prismic for sites like Enough for All and Alberta Ecotrust, when they suited the project better.

A Studio shaped to the team

Wee Wild Ones runs a growing network of not-for-profit childcare centres, so the CMS had to handle centres that did not exist yet. A Location model lets a new centre launch with the basics and add photography and detail over time. French routing and province-specific routing were live while the site was still English only. The inquiry forms are content too, built with a multi-step form builder in the Studio that replaced the PDFs families used to download.

Commerce with a content layer

Milk Jar Candle Co. sells on Shopify, and the rest of the site is authored in Sanity, so brand content and merchandising sit beside the catalogue instead of being squeezed into product descriptions. The site won a Gold Anvil at the 2024 Anvils Awards for visual and technical excellence, and Milk Jar's marketing and operations teams can act quickly on new ideas and product segments.