Coalfield site

Every copy change was a ticket

Coalfield’s old site was hand-built page by page. Changing a headline meant a pull request, a review and a deploy. Marketing had a backlog of forty small edits that no engineer would ever get to, so the site slowly stopped saying anything true.

The fix was a content model, not a redesign

We spent longer on the shape of the content than on the look of it. What is a page made of? Eight block types, it turned out — hero, feature row, proof strip, pricing table, FAQ, quote, logo wall, closing call to action. Everything the team wanted to publish fit into a stack of those eight.

• Blocks, not pages. Marketing assembles a page from blocks; nobody writes markup.
• Content in Markdown. Reviewable in a pull request, editable in a text box, and portable if they ever leave the stack.
• Tokens for everything visual. Spacing, colour and type come from one file, so a brand tweak is a one-line change rather than a sweep.

The handover

Two engineers built the entire site from the component library in eight days. The documentation is in the repository next to the components, which is the only place it stands a chance of staying current.