Designing a CMS Editors Actually Want to Use: The Narrative Agency

Our first post about The Narrative Agency's website covered the interface: a site built to let case study work carry the page. What we did not cover is what happens behind that interface every time the agency publishes something new, because that is where most website projects like this actually go wrong.

The Narrative Agency's team is small, and nobody on it wants to learn a component library to add a case study. So the brief we set ourselves was simple: whatever content model we built had to be editable by someone who has never opened a code editor, without them accidentally breaking the layout.

We built the CMS around content blocks rather than free text fields. An editor adding a new project chooses from a small set of block types, a hero image, a pull quote, a two column gallery, a results summary, and fills in the content for each. There is no rich text field where someone can paste in a mismatched heading size or an image at the wrong aspect ratio. The system enforces the typography and spacing rules automatically, so every case study reads consistently even though several different people might work on one across its life.

We also built in guardrails that most agency sites skip. Image upload rejects anything under the resolution the layout needs rather than silently stretching a small file across a full width hero. Required fields are actually required, so nobody publishes a case study missing a client name because the deadline was tight.

The payoff is not visible in a design review. It shows up months later, when the agency has published a dozen new projects without ever asking us to fix a broken layout or resize an image. A CMS that survives contact with a busy non technical team, long after launch, is a better measure of a website build than how it looks on day one.