Tao Architecture
The ask
Tao Architecture's previous website was hand-coded PHP (jQuery, Bootstrap 3 and a MySQL database), uploaded by FTP. It looked dated, didn't adapt properly to phones and tablets, and was slow to load. Every project had its own PHP file and all the text and photos were written into the code, so even a small change meant relying on a developer. The only admin was a basic panel for job applications. The studio, led by principal architect Manish Banker and known for sustainable villas, corporate offices and eco-sensitive resorts, needed a modern website that its own team could keep up to date.
The approach
Rebuilt the site from scratch as two connected parts. The public site is Next.js and React with Tailwind, organised around how clients size up an architect: Work (with a category filter), Services, Studio, a Media section for awards, publications and videos, and Career. Every project now uses one shared page template, with its content stored in a PostgreSQL database instead of a separate file per project. A separate Express API with Prisma talks to that database, and photos are stored on Cloudinary, which resizes each image for the visitor's browser. Both parts run on Vercel, and every change goes through a staging site and automated tests before it reaches the live one. Then built a custom admin panel, so the studio's team can update the site from a phone, tablet or desktop, wherever they are.
What visitors get
- Project pages with a photo gallery, lightbox, captions and related projects
- A full-screen search that also looks inside project descriptions
- A Videos page that updates itself from the studio's YouTube channel once a day
- Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages, with consent on the forms
- Clean page addresses, proper page titles, link previews and a sitemap for search engines
What the studio's team can do in the admin panel
- Publish and edit projects with a rich-text editor: reorder gallery photos, add captions, pick related projects and preview before publishing
- Choose which part of a photo each project card shows
- Edit the home page: hero slides, banner text and the category grid
- Add or edit studio members, awards, publications, services and page intros
- Update contact details, social links and the footer tagline
- Read contact messages, forward each one to the right person, and review job applications, giving each a status; applicants' files stay private
- Give each admin access only to the sections they need, with one master admin managing the accounts and seeing an activity log of who changed what
The outcome
From hand-coded PHP pages to a Next.js platform with a database and a custom admin panel: the studio updates its own site from any device, no developer needed.
The studio now runs its own website: projects, the home page, the team, awards, enquiries and job applications are all handled in the admin panel, without waiting on a developer. Sign-in protection, private applicant files and a staging-first release process were added too; none of that existed on the old site. The site is live at taoarchitecture.com and scores 81 / 100 (Bright) on Havelow's own health check with no failures: valid HTTPS, canonical tag and structured data, a clean heading structure, every image described and every link working.
