An architecture practice took full ownership of its portfolio publishing

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

An architecture and interiors practice of a dozen people, with a portfolio spanning a decade of residential and cultural work. The projects photograph and draw well — this is a practice that wins work on the strength of its images. But publishing had passed through one freelancer for years, and the practice's own people had never seen the inside of their CMS. Completed buildings waited, sometimes for half a year, to exist online.

What it was costing

Portfolio updates required the original freelancer, who had become a single point of failure: new projects waited months, the practice's strongest work was invisible, and the practice had no idea what their own CMS looked like.

What they could see

• New projects waited months to appear online; completed buildings weren't on the site in the season they opened.
• Every update required the original freelancer, who was often booked and sometimes slow to answer.
• Nobody at the practice could say what was in the CMS or how a page got built.
• The strongest recent work existed only as images on a partner's laptop.

The constraints we worked inside

• Large photography and drawings were the content; the system had to handle heavy media gracefully.
• The practice partners approved imagery in group sessions — the workflow needed a staging surface they could review together.
• No one at the practice wanted to learn 'web development'; editing had to feel like filing a project record.

What had been tried before

An office administrator was trained to add projects in the existing CMS herself.

The media steps alone exceeded the task — resizing, exporting crops, uploading variants — and she abandoned it after two attempts.

The practice asked the freelancer for a simpler template to lower the effort.

Months passed before delivery, and the template still ended at his doorstep for anything involving photography or drawings.

What we proposed

We proposed modeling projects as structured records — typology, location, size, photography sets — with templates rendering the page, so publishing becomes data entry an office administrator can do without touching layout. The media pipeline defines crop ratios per template and generates hero and grid variants, ending hand-exported imagery. Approvals move onto staging: partners review unpublished records together in their existing group sessions, and publishing follows the session rather than an email chain. The freelancer dependency ends; the practice owns the whole loop.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• Keeping the freelancer with a documented handoff process — A process document doesn't remove a single point of failure; it just records whose absence stops publishing.
• A hosted portfolio service aimed at photographers — Heavy drawings and photography plus partner staging approvals sat outside what those services model; the practice would have adapted itself to the tool.
• A bespoke static site with a developer on call — Publishing had to feel like filing a record; a static site makes every project a build, which is the dependency being removed.

How the work ran

Delivered by the experience pod — designer + frontend engineer over 5 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

Webflow

Visual publishing that feels like filing a record; the practice needed the freelancer dependency gone, not a friendlier version of it.

Webflow CMS

Typology, location, size, and photography sets become fields the office administrator fills; a record publishes only after the partners mark it up in their session, so publishing is review-gated data entry rather than layout work.

Native responsive imaging

Photography and drawing sets arrive in print conventions — full-bleed scans, fixed sheet ratios — and the pipeline generates crop and grid variants automatically; hand-exported imagery was the hidden labor that stopped updates.

Staging workflow

Partners approve in group sessions on staging links; the review became part of the workflow instead of an email chain nobody finished.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

Fortnightly review timed to the partners' approval sessions — we presented on staging, they marked up imagery and text, and the office administrator kept decisions in the record.

Client side

The office administrator owned data entry day to day; the partners approved in group sessions; the practice photographer handled imagery standards after kickoff.

Decisions

Publishing decisions were the partners' by consensus in the session; template and media standards were settled once with the photographer and documented.

They provided

Five years of project archives — photography, drawings, credits — plus the administrator's time and the photographer for one working session on crop rules.

What changed

The headline: published projects in the first two months after handover (was 3 in the prior year) — 3 → 14, read from CMS record count. A second check: publisher dependencies outside the practice at 0.

Publishing a project feels like filing a record, which was the whole requirement. The practice's strongest work from recent years is now visible to prospective clients, and partners reference their own site in first meetings instead of emailing PDFs. The office administrator owns the workflow end to end; the practice stopped being unable to answer can-we-see-more-of-your-work with anything but an apology.

The result was read from CMS record count against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on publisher dependencies outside the practice. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The Webflow project with project-record templates and the media pipeline configured.
• The written crop-ratio spec the photographer worked from, kept with the templates.
• A staging-review routine the partners already ran twice, documented as steps.
• The office administrator trained end to end, including archive entry for old projects.
• The full project archive modeled as records, ready for back-catalogue entry.