Malarky-free content management

Project: Custom CMS for a personal coaching business

Role: Team lead, product design
What that means I really did: Designed and architected the CMS, front-end and CMS information architecture; directed the work (front-end and CMS) of other designers on the team; co-led interdisciplinary project team, including project planning and client relationship management

DockYard: Emily Rabenold (Client Partner Lead), Pat Collins (Engineering Lead), Judith Camara-Harvey (Client Partner Lead), Safoora Fakhri (Senior Product Designer / Design Lead), Anna Vasylenko (Product Designer), Hanna Wendt (Senior User Experience Developer)


No BS is a successful and ambitious personal coaching company fueled by the formidable charisma of the company’s CEO. She and her husband/CTO partnered with DockYard to replatform their existing product from WordPress to Elixir. More than a rebuild, content migration, and relaunch, however, they were interested in building a system that could work for multiple verticals — and they wanted to start with an MVP of their newest venture.

We started small. But once their new MVP was up and generating revenue, we got to work designing a CMS they could use across parallel verticals utilizing a shared, themable design system.

Like most people, the client’s staff are not technologists or designers; we strived to remove as many technical and design decisions as possible from their workflows, while providing them with enough flexibility to produce a high degree of variety in their content — both the content types they were currently producing, as well as types we might imagine they would product in the future as their products continue to grow and evolve. 

The result was a small set of templates, featuring one stand-out: we named it the universal template, because it was designed to run 90% of their existing pages. Based on an extensive audit of their existing site, we developed a complete set of needed components and composed them onto the template in a set order, each able to be toggled on or off, depending on the content needs of any particular page.

We built a singularly impressive component, as well: the resources component was designed to serve multiple purposes in multiple formats, with selectable layout and functionality options. It proved to be an engineering challenge, but the final result was a powerful element in a durable and powerful system.

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