A sustainability standard whose new design needed more freedom than WordPress could give.

Starting point

Cotton made in Africa is a standard for sustainably grown cotton from Africa, run by the Aid by Trade Foundation. The website ran on WordPress, in English and German. The new design came from Studio-Blend. The goal was a more flexible backend and a technical base that makes design work and new features faster and freer to build.

What we built

• We built Studio-Blend's design with Next.js on the front end and Payload as the CMS. The foundation manages its content in Payload, and the layout follows the design, not the limits of a theme.
• We migrated the content from WordPress in both languages and moved the site to a new server. Media files are still served from their original addresses.
• Performance is part of the architecture: pages are generated ahead of time and served from the cache, and images arrive in the size each device needs.
• GDPR compliant through a custom consent dialog: before consent, the site loads only from its own domain, and Google analytics and advertising load only afterwards. Accessibility with the German Accessibility Act (BFSG) in mind was part of the build from the start.

Result

A fast website that carries the design exactly as drawn and can grow with new content and page types without switching systems.