The platform was decided before the first design.

Major is an agency I’ve worked with for almost ten years, on about half a dozen projects. They brought me into the NCREP project before it started. There was no design yet, only Leihla’s description of what the client needed, and she needed to know which platform to propose.

That was enough to choose the platform. NCREP is a heritage consultancy with offices in Portugal and in the UK, and each market has services the other doesn’t offer. So the brief was really two sites: a bilingual one for Portugal and an English one for the UK.

Two markets, one platform

When I heard “bilingual” and “a separate site for the UK”, I knew Webflow wasn’t the right fit. Separate URLs meant either two projects or a system to keep them in sync.

There was a way round it. I could have used the Webflow CMS API to generate the UK site in Astro, with only the content for that market. It would have worked, but it added a second build and a sync layer for a problem Craft solves on its own.

I proposed Craft CMS at the first meeting with the client. Nobody had a platform in mind, so the decision was mine, and I’d already built this kind of structure in Craft before.

In Craft, ncrep.com (Portuguese and English) and ncrep.co.uk (English) are two sites in the same install. Services, sectors, portfolio projects, team profiles and insights are entered once, and each entry can be switched on for one market, the other or both. The UK site reuses the English content and only shows what applies there.

Building from Major’s design

The design is all Major’s. Once it was ready I built the templates from it, and when things changed along the way (they always do), I changed the templates with them. From the first technical discovery to launch it took four months.

I was in every technical meeting with NCREP, as Major’s technical partner. Strategy and content stayed with Major. That’s the way I like to work with agencies: they keep the relationship, and I answer for the technical side.

There was no migration. Nothing from the old site was reused, so the content was entered into Craft from scratch.

Small modules instead of big plugins

The contact form was already designed, success and error states included. It needed an engine, not a form builder. So I wrote a small module: each enquiry is emailed to NCREP and saved in Craft, where the team sees every submission without logging into another tool. Turnstile keeps the spam out.

A second module looks after URLs. When a project’s title changes, it rewrites the slug and adds the redirect, so links from Google and from other sites keep working.

Technical SEO from the start

The old site had no technical SEO to speak of. I brought it in as part of the build: a sitemap per site, hreflang, breadcrumbs and structured data.

Google indexed both sites quickly after launch, and kept them apart. Each one shows up in its own market.