Background
The Web Project Guide started as a publicly available online resource — a practical, chapter-by-chapter guide to building and managing web projects, written by Deane Barker and Corey Vilhauer of Blend Interactive. The content was written in Markdown across a handful of publishing tools, built for print rather than for web management. There was no CMS, no editorial workflow, and no real path to adding new content without pushing code.
When the book was finished and printed, the question became: what happens to the site? The answer was to give it a proper home — one built to grow, built to be managed, and built on Umbraco.
Solution
Blend took the existing design and rebuilt it on Umbraco, enhancing the content model to support richer, more flexible content going forward. The migration brought all 24 chapters into the CMS, and the new architecture added a news feed and a podcast series template — giving the authors a clear editorial path for keeping the site active. Pages could now include custom content blocks, and publishing went from pushing code to simply clicking Publish.
But the most interesting problem Blend solved wasn't about content management at all — it was about search. Each of the 24 chapters is long-form, running thousands of words. A standard search would return a chapter-level result, leaving readers to skim a 5,000-word page to find the specific reference they were looking for. Blend's solution was to rethink the content model at a more granular level. Rather than treating the site as 24 chapters, Umbraco was configured to treat it as nearly 100 individual chapter sections — each with its own search title and metadata — allowing search to surface the exact section where a term appears. The front-end experience stays exactly the same; the chapter still reads as a single page. The section structure is entirely invisible to the reader, but it makes every result meaningfully more useful.
Impact
The result is a site that works the way a reference book should — easy to browse, easy to manage, and easy to search. Umbraco's flexibility made it straightforward to implement a content model that most platforms would have required significant custom work to support. The authors moved from no editorial workflow to a fully managed CMS without losing anything about how the site looks or reads, and the search architecture laid the groundwork for a more powerful search experience in future releases — one that actually gets readers to the right answer, not just the right chapter.
Results
