Same site, new experience - converting a static site to a CMS

Part of web development and design involves constant learning and experimentation, it's how we get better at what we do. With this in mind, I decided to take on myself as a client to experiment with the process and see what can be achieved.

The brief was simple - I have a small site (this one) with a few basic pages, a contact form and some images. It is currently a static site and i'm not able to easily update it if I want to add a new page or edit some of the content. I'd like to put a content management system (CMS) behind this site, so that i can make easy edits to it without needing to code.

Given that there's not going to be any noticeable changes to the design, the goal was to basically recreate the site so that it looks the same from the outside, but the way that the site comes together behind the scenes would allow for an easy editing experience.

The CMS i've chosen to go with is PayloadCMS. It's a relatively new player in the game, and while it's been around for a couple of years, as of the latest version 3.0 it has really come into its own as a modern content management system. With a bit of fiddling and configuring, blocks of content in the backend are now showing in the front end, and with some styling on top, we're now seeing the same front end design as before we were using Payload - great!

At first, the editing experience was a little frustrating, with screens showing up by default that weren't usually the first thing that I wanted to edit. So a little more tweaking and configuring and now the most likely content that needs to be updated shows up first. Payload is really flexible like that, basically all the functionality including what is shown by default and the way that content is first displayed to you can be customised.

Adding in a contact form and setting up an email for me to be notified when someone fills it in was easy too, as Payload has a great form builder plugin that works great out of the box with almost no tweaking needed.

With all that, from a web visitor perspective virtually nothing will have changed, but the editing experience has been transformed, enabling blog posts like this to be written and published as quickly as one could write them.

If you've got an old site that needs to be brought into 2025, or a static site that you think you want to build upon, get in touch and let's have a chat!