The Centr8 Platform — our first proof of capability

The challenge

A technology partner is judged by its own website before it is ever judged by its work. If our site loaded slowly, broke on a phone, or felt like a template, no amount of copy about "senior craft" would be believed. The brief we set ourselves was simple to say and hard to do: ship a site that is itself a portfolio piece.

The deeper challenge was speed of change. Centr8 spans eight disciplines, each with its own service page, plus industries, work, and a growing blog. We needed a foundation where a non-developer could publish content and where a new page could be assembled in hours, not days — without the design drifting and without performance quietly degrading every time something was added.

Our approach

We treated our own marketing site like a product. Instead of styling pages one at a time, we built a small, opinionated design system first — tokens for color, type, and spacing, then a library of composable sections (heroes, pillar grids, stat strips, FAQs, CTA bands) that every page draws from. Content lives in Sanity so it can be edited without touching code, and the front end is a Next.js 14 App Router build deployed on Vercel.

Performance and accessibility were acceptance criteria from the first commit, not a cleanup pass at the end. Images are optimized and lazy-loaded, fonts are preconnected, motion respects reduced-motion preferences, and every interactive control is keyboard-reachable with sensible focus states and semantic markup.

• A token-driven design system: one primary blue plus neutrals, reused across every page for consistency
• Reusable section components so new pages are composed, not hand-coded from scratch
• Sanity CMS (Studio at /studio) so content and SEO fields are editable without a deploy
• Next.js 14 App Router on Vercel for fast, statically-optimized delivery and clean routing
• Accessibility baked in — semantic HTML, keyboard support, focus states, and reduced-motion handling
• Per-page metadata, canonical URLs, and JSON-LD structured data wired in from the start

The result

The platform did its job: it gave us a site we are happy to be measured by, and a foundation the rest of the site is built on. The numbers below are our own internal targets for the build — the standard we hold every page to, not figures from a paying client.