Website built twice: first as a Next.js front end with WordPress as a headless CMS, then fully migrated into WordPress — preserving all Tailwind styling, animations, and interactions through a custom theme, custom shortcodes, custom theme parts, and custom Elementor widgets.
A project that went through two distinct technical phases — and the challenge of the second was to make it indistinguishable from the first.
The site was initially built with Next.js and styled with Tailwind CSS, using WordPress as a headless content source. This gave full control over the front-end architecture: routing, rendering, component structure, and a rich set of scroll-driven animations and UI interactions built directly into the React layer.
The site was later moved entirely into WordPress to give the client direct CMS control over layout and content without a decoupled front end. The core challenge was carrying everything from Phase 1 into the WordPress environment without regression — not just the visual styles, but all the interaction patterns and animation behaviors that had been built in React.
This required a purpose-built approach: a fully custom WordPress theme structured with custom theme parts, custom shortcodes for reusable content blocks, and custom Elementor widgets to replicate the component-level flexibility of the original React architecture. The Tailwind CSS system was integrated into the theme build pipeline, preserving the design language and utility class structure from the original codebase.