Why we're writing this
Gearabout was our most technically ambitious project. A 4,000-article archive, a fastidious editorial team and a readership that would notice any regression in quality.
We shipped it on time and within budget. But there were decisions we'd make differently.
What went well
The CMS migration
Moving 4,000 articles from WordPress to Sanity without content loss was the thing we were most nervous about. We built a custom migration script with full round-trip validation. Final result: zero content loss.
The reading experience
The long-read format tested better than anything we'd shipped before. Bounce rates dropped from 67% to 31%.
What we'd do differently
We underestimated the CMS training
The technical delivery was smooth. The content team handoff was not. We allocated 4 hours for CMS training. We needed 12.
Lesson: CMS complexity is a UX problem for editors, not just readers.
We over-engineered the article template system
We built a flexible template system with 7 layout variants. The editorial team uses 2 of them.
Lesson: Build for the jobs the content team actually does, not the jobs they theoretically might do.
Written by the ArtX team
We're a small team of designers, engineers and search strategists.