A new site in Webflow, with every page of the old one.

The José Neves Foundation contacted me because I work with Webflow. They had already decided to move their site there, away from Gatsby and Contentful, and they needed someone to do it.

Their reason was simple. The old site looked good, but the front end and the back end felt like two different places, and everyday changes needed a developer. They wanted their team to run the site.

Their worry was simple too. The site was well indexed, with more than 250 pages and articles. They didn’t want to lose any of it: no missing pages, no broken links, no 404s.

Rebuilt from the Figma file

They sent a complete Figma file with every page designed. I built the new site from scratch in Webflow, from that file. Nothing from the Gatsby code was reused.

The old site had a distinctive way of moving: scroll-triggered movement, staggered transitions, animated menus, hover states, modals and a homepage slider. Simple hovers stayed in CSS. Webflow Interactions did what it could, and GSAP took the sequences that needed more control than Webflow offered at the time.

Migrating 250 pages without copying them

The migration was the biggest risk, so I treated it as data, not as content entry.

I used the Contentful API to extract the existing structure and content, cleaned and reshaped it in Parabola, and imported it into the Webflow CMS. All of the existing content moved that way. Most URLs stayed the same. Where a page was renamed or a slug had to change, a redirect in Webflow sends the old address to the new one, so what Google had already indexed kept working. Nothing was lost. (This is what the CMS migration page is about.)

The only content entered by hand was new: pages and sections the old site never had, which the Foundation’s team wrote and added themselves.

A library for young people

The new site also has something the old one didn’t: Biblioteca FJN. The Foundation works on education and employment, and the library is mostly for young people looking into study, work and careers. It brings together insights, reports, guides, articles and tools.

It needed more structure than a standard marketing site. The CMS has 27 collections, with multi-reference fields and supporting collections where Webflow’s native relationships weren’t enough. The filters by theme, type and tag use Jetboost and some custom JavaScript, so combinations stay consistent.

Four months, by hand

The site launched in four months, on time, with no significant issues after launch. It’s also faster than the Gatsby version was. This was before I worked with AI tools, so all of it (the build, the animations, the migration scripts) was done by hand.

The team runs the site on its own today, either visually on the page or directly in the CMS. I still work with the Foundation, on this site and on other projects.