Content management

Headless content management with Sanity

The 374-episode catalogue at This is HCD and Miray Yapım's bilingual production archive are both managed in Sanity. In both cases the content teams update everything without technical support.

Choosing a CMS is usually a decision about the content model rather than the interface. A badly built model turns into an admin panel that nobody on the content team wants to open.

01

The content model comes before the interface

How you structure document types in Sanity determines the editor's daily experience. Make every page a free text block and the layout falls apart. Make it too rigid and every new piece of content needs a developer. At Miray Yapım, each production is a single document with Turkish and English fields side by side, so the two languages are not managed as separate trees that slowly drift out of sync with one another.

02

When you do not need one

If your content rarely changes and a developer is doing the updates anyway, a CMS is an unnecessary layer. Keeping the text in code is faster and cheaper. We recommend Sanity when someone non-technical will be updating content regularly. Panels installed for the sake of having one generally sit empty, and you have still paid for all the modelling work that went into building them.

03

The same content on several surfaces

The real benefit of a headless setup is using the same content across different surfaces. Our own sites work this way: projects and articles from one dataset appear both on the studio site and in the founder's portfolio, each with its own design. You do not have to update the same content in two places, and the two versions never end up disagreeing with each other.

04

Caching and how fast changes appear

On statically generated pages, how quickly a content change becomes visible is a design decision. A short cache reflects edits immediately but increases server load. A long cache is cheap but leaves the editor thinking their change did not save. We set this window based on how often the content actually changes, and we tell the editor what to expect so nobody files a bug against the cache.

Proof

Products we shipped with exactly this.

Questions

The things people ask before starting.

Can someone non-technical update the content?

Yes, that is the point. We set up fields with clear names and a working preview. At This is HCD and Miray Yapım, content updates happen without a developer being involved at any stage.

Can we build a multilingual site?

Yes. Miray Yapım is live in Turkish and English. Keeping both languages inside the same document stops the two versions drifting apart and makes missing translations visible instead of silently absent.

Why choose this over WordPress?

If you want content kept independent of one site's templates and reused across several surfaces, headless has the advantage. For a single blog with an established editorial workflow, WordPress can still be a perfectly reasonable choice.

Who owns our content?

The dataset sits in your account and can be exported at any time. During setup we recommend the account is opened in your name, so ownership never becomes a question later on.

Contact

Looking for an engineering partner for the long haul?

A short note about the product, the timeline and who it is for is enough to start. You will hear back from the engineer who would do the work, not a sales team.

Ankara / Türkiye · Working across European and US time zones