Engineering
Why we build admin panels before we build features
A product your client cannot edit is a product they will pay you to edit forever. Here is how we scope the CMS first.
Almost every project we inherit has the same shape: a beautiful front end, and content welded into the templates. Changing a headline means a developer, a deploy and a wait.
We start from the other end. Before the first page template is written, we ask which parts of this product will change monthly, which will change yearly, and which will never change. Anything in the first two categories becomes a database row and an admin form.
The test we apply
If a non-technical colleague cannot make a change in under two minutes without asking anyone, the change is not really possible. That standard forces good decisions — clear content models, sensible defaults, and validation that explains itself.
It costs a little more up front. It costs dramatically less across the years a product actually lives.