The New Website Build-Part 2: Where the rebuild actually landed.
What we built for Crown Social isn’t “headless” in the way that term usually gets used today. There’s no detached CMS flinging JSON at a frontend that has to guess what it means.
Where the rebuild actually landed
This is the part that matters.
What we built for Crown Social isn’t “headless” in the way that term usually gets used today. There’s no detached CMS flinging JSON at a frontend that has to guess what it means.
Instead, the system is:
explicitly modeled
server-rendered
data-first
presentation-aware
We own the data model.
We own the rendering.
We own session state.
HTML is generated directly.
Abstraction exists only where it earns its keep.
That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t nostalgia.
We looked seriously at modern headless setups. Tools like Sanity offer a lot of flexibility, especially when you need multiple frontends consuming the same content. We’ve built those systems for clients, and they can be the right answer in the right context.
But for our own site, they introduced an extra layer of indirection without solving our actual problem. We didn’t need content to be everywhere. We needed it to be correct, relational, and inspectable.
We also considered more abstracted stacks. React-heavy frontends. Node-based backends. Systems where the UI becomes the source of truth. Those approaches can move fast, but they tend to push complexity into places that are harder to reason about later, especially when state, SEO, and long-lived content matter.
What we landed on was more first-principles than trendy.
A system where:
canonical data lives in the database
relationships are explicit
session state is intentional
rendering is deterministic
and nothing “magical” happens without being written down
It’s closer to how companies like Google, Netflix, and Shopify actually build their internal tooling, not how they market their platforms. The difference is subtle but important. Internally, clarity beats cleverness every time.
We spend a lot of time building on top of other people’s platforms. Webflow. Shopify. Squarespace. WordPress. Framer. AI-assisted tools like Cursor and CODEX. Each has its place, and we’re fluent in all of them.
Rebuilding our own site wasn’t about rejecting those tools. It was about having one place where the model, the state, and the rendering were ours end to end again.
Less about proving we could do it.
More about making sure our front door reflects how we actually think.
This is the part that matters.
What we built for Crown Social isn’t “headless” in the way that term usually gets used today. There’s no detached CMS flinging JSON at a frontend that has to guess what it means.
Instead, the system is:
explicitly modeled
server-rendered
data-first
presentation-aware
We own the data model.
We own the rendering.
We own session state.
HTML is generated directly.
Abstraction exists only where it earns its keep.
That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t nostalgia.
We looked seriously at modern headless setups. Tools like Sanity offer a lot of flexibility, especially when you need multiple frontends consuming the same content. We’ve built those systems for clients, and they can be the right answer in the right context.
But for our own site, they introduced an extra layer of indirection without solving our actual problem. We didn’t need content to be everywhere. We needed it to be correct, relational, and inspectable.
We also considered more abstracted stacks. React-heavy frontends. Node-based backends. Systems where the UI becomes the source of truth. Those approaches can move fast, but they tend to push complexity into places that are harder to reason about later, especially when state, SEO, and long-lived content matter.
What we landed on was more first-principles than trendy.
A system where:
canonical data lives in the database
relationships are explicit
session state is intentional
rendering is deterministic
and nothing “magical” happens without being written down
It’s closer to how companies like Google, Netflix, and Shopify actually build their internal tooling, not how they market their platforms. The difference is subtle but important. Internally, clarity beats cleverness every time.
We spend a lot of time building on top of other people’s platforms. Webflow. Shopify. Squarespace. WordPress. Framer. AI-assisted tools like Cursor and CODEX. Each has its place, and we’re fluent in all of them.
Rebuilding our own site wasn’t about rejecting those tools. It was about having one place where the model, the state, and the rendering were ours end to end again.
Less about proving we could do it.
More about making sure our front door reflects how we actually think.