New CMS Corporate Website

McLaren Construction is one of the UK's leading construction companies, operating nationally across residential, commercial, healthcare and public sector development. I was brought in as sole engineer with a brief to replace an ageing WordPress site and give the business genuine ownership and control over its digital presence.

The engagement required me to operate from the very beginning as a technical authority, not just an implementer. I authored a formal technical plan early in the project, presenting the proposed architecture and technology choices clearly enough for non-technical stakeholders to evaluate and approve. Working alongside a Product Owner and Web Designer, I was responsible for the engineering decisions from stack selection through to delivery and handover.

Platform and architecture

I designed and built a modern React/Next.js application with Prismic as a headless CMS, hosted and continuously deployed via Vercel. The previous WordPress site had been maintained by an external agency, meaning the marketing team had little autonomy over their own content — every update required going back to a third party. The new platform gave them direct, independent control for the first time.

The content architecture was designed from scratch around McLaren's specific needs rather than inherited from WordPress's structural assumptions. The Product Owner defined a new bespoke content schema covering construction projects, company officer profiles, news articles, vacancies, downloadable documents, and supporting taxonomy — which I rendered digitally via a slice-based page model allowing editors to assemble rich pages without engineering input.

Microsite capability

The most technically involved feature was a self-serve microsite system allowing the marketing team to launch and host branded microsites at chosen subdomains entirely through the CMS, with no engineering required. This was achieved through a combination of a CMS-configurable Site document model, wildcard DNS routing, and Vercel's automated build pipeline — so that creating a new microsite was purely a content operation. Before this, launching a microsite would have required commissioning separate development work through a third-party each time.

Performance

By replacing WordPress with static site generation via Next.js, the rebuilt site delivered substantially faster load times. Pages are pre-rendered at build time and served as lightweight, browser-ready assets — a fundamental architectural improvement over the server-rendered WordPress predecessor.

Handover

At project completion I authored a comprehensive Website Handbook for the McLaren marketing team, covering content management workflows, microsite creation, technical architecture explained accessibly, domain and DNS management, guidance on hiring future developers, and where to find ongoing support. The goal was to leave the business fully capable of operating and evolving the platform independently — without any ongoing dependency on me or any other specific developer.

Outcome

The project replaced a third-party-dependent, editorially restricted WordPress site with a fast, modern, fully owned digital platform. The marketing team gained direct content autonomy, a capable CMS tailored to their actual needs, and a genuinely novel capability — the ability to spin up microsites on demand — that did not exist before.