The situation

Every website we built at Project N started from a blank page. Different code every time, and a lot of the web development was outsourced, which wasn’t cheap. Then the agency started winning more web work, deadlines got tighter, and it was obvious that wasn’t going to hold up.

So I pushed for a different way of working.

What i did

I led the build of Cerebro, our own in-house web framework. It’s named after the X-Men machine, because it was the brains of the operation.

The idea was a visual composer we built ourselves. Nuxt was the codebase, with a library of fully coded components on top: carousels, video players, headings, layouts. Built once and done properly, then reskinned for each client with custom UI and CSS. Every site looked completely different. The code underneath was the same.

The content lived in a headless CMS, and we made that swappable. Strapi came first, and Steer Studios is one of those builds. Some clients were already on WordPress and didn’t want to move, so the same codebase plugged into headless WordPress instead. Ask About Games, one of the other projects on this site, is the proof. It’s a fully custom front end talking to WordPress through its API, so their team edits content in a system they already know while the site itself is built entirely in-house. Custom content types, SEO data carried through from the CMS, all server-rendered for speed. One codebase, and updates we could push across everything built on it.

I led two developers and two designers as senior designer and product manager, reporting into the Creative Director. The dev team grew from one to two as the web work came in, and I managed both.

What came out of it

Turnaround dropped from a month at minimum to 21 days, end to end, and web development moved in-house instead of being outsourced.

The best part came later. UKIE, who own Ask About Games, wanted a full site. It was a much bigger and more technical job, with members areas and everything that comes with it. I scoped it out with Cerebro as the foundation, on WordPress. It was built after I’d left, but that’s what it stood on.

The sites below were all built on Cerebro.