We developed a headless website for brightonSEO, with additional features such as an integrated schedule, better speaker management and improved user experience.
With the need to update the brightonSEO website to the latest technology, they worked with us to produce a headless solution with Sanity and Next.js.
Next.js, Sanity.io, Tailwind, Storybook, React, GroQ
brightonSEO was launched on Vercel and uses Next.js
The new website is built with Sanity
“ We'd outgrown our WordPress setup as our events have grown and become more complex. Moving to a modern, future-proof headless solution using Sanity and Next.js has facilitated our growth, which includes rapidly launching a website for our first US conference. We have exciting plans for future development, which includes integrating more features such as additional schema markup, allowing attendees to build personalised schedules and automating some of our processes. ”
We presented our findings and approach at brightonSEO in September 2023
brightonSEO is the largest search marketing conference in the world, with over 5,000 attendees to its twice-yearly Brighton 3-day events as well as a new San Diego event, and an active community who stream content and attend training.
The conference wanted to capitalize on the popularity of its brand with a more robust website to provide greater content reuse and better experiences for speakers and attendees alike. After finding themselves restricted by the limits of WordPress, they went on the hunt for a new content system. Lemon Hive, a company specializing in headless architectures, were appointed to build the new website, and an exceptional CMS implementation was vital to prevent the build up to each event becoming overwhelming for the internal team to manage.
Our strategy, built out through the discovery phase utilised Sanity as the CMS, Next.js for the front-end and other tools such as Figma, Tailwind, and Storybook.
The existing website had served brightonSEO well for a number of years, but it had reached the stage where it was becoming incredibly time consuming to manage and update for two conferences each year. It also lacked features that are expected of the website for a leading digital marketing conference such as the talk schedule on the website.
Lemon Hive worked with brightonSEO to resolve the issues that existed and with the power of decoupled architecture and a market leading content management system, we were able to produce an architecture that enabled smoother management, better user experience as well as the ability to build in additional features for the future.
All the improvements have saved the brightonSEO team a significant amount of time and have made it much easier to manage the website and update it without relying on the developer team at Lemon Hive to handcraft every request.
Sanity allowed us to customize brightonSEO's editing experience. We created workflows based on specific content types and management tasks. This tailored workspace, and component-based build approach empowers brightonSEO's content team to make changes to the site independently. They can update standard pages and interactive content like the new Schedule content type.
Content reuse improves efficiency, SEO, and UX. A more structured content model using Sanity for entities like Speakers, Trainers, Talks, and Courses, enables conference information to be better organised and reused it in various pages.
Image for content as data/entities
Simplified content relationship diagram
The prior website had pain points, including the discontinuation of publishing an interactive schedule in 2021 due to the time-consuming and challenging nature of managing it with the previous CMS. With our implementation, the Schedule feature can be leveraged for upcoming conferences, and during conferences, providing attendees with insightful information and allowing for on-demand exploration.
Image for the new schedule module (shows on the site when the schedule has been confirmed)
We also included additional functions to improve efficiency in managing the site. With the new build, the brightonSEO team can now bulk upload data as a CSV, this autogenerates pages populated with the correct content.
All essential SEO aspects are easily managed through the CMS, we built customised SEO factors as required, adding the features you would get from a standard SEO tool such as Yoast or Rank Math, but optimised for brightonSEO.
The project aimed to implement a CMS and achieve targeted outcomes, including streamlining website management and positioning brightonSEO for growth.
Key results
