Overview
Wordings Digital Agency is a Nigerian writing services company offering career documentation, academic writing, content marketing strategy, and market research. Alongside its core services, the agency runs Wordings Academy — a cohort-based EdTech arm offering professional courses in content marketing, SEO, social media, and B2B strategy.
I was brought in to design and build their website from scratch. There was no existing site, no established visual identity for the web, and no defined content structure. My role covered everything — information architecture, UX and visual design, full-stack development, CMS integration, and client communication across a team of five stakeholders.
The Brief
Wordings came to me as a new startup with a growing service offering and no digital presence. The brief wasn't handed to me fully formed — I helped shape it. Through conversations with the founding team, I mapped out what the site needed to do: communicate four distinct service pillars clearly, position the Academy as a serious EdTech product, generate leads through every page, and give the team a CMS they could update independently after handoff.
The result is an 18-page site covering four service pages, a full Academy section with individual course detail pages, a blog, a resources library, an About page, legal pages, and an AI-powered content checker — all built on a single domain.
The Challenge
The core design challenge wasn't visual. It was structural.
Wordings is two things at once — a professional writing agency and an education platform. These two offerings attract different audiences, carry different value propositions, and require different content strategies. The risk was designing a site that tried to serve both and ended up serving neither clearly.
On top of that, the Academy is currently the company's primary revenue driver. Any structural decision that undersold it would directly impact the business. Getting the architecture right wasn't a cosmetic decision — it was a commercial one.
The Key Decision — One Site, Not Two
Early in the project, the client proposed making the Academy a standalone website on a separate domain. On the surface it made sense — the Academy has its own brand, its own audience, and its own product logic. Giving it a separate home felt like it would give it more room to breathe.
I pushed back.
My reasoning was straightforward. Splitting the Academy onto a separate domain would split everything that makes a website valuable — domain authority, SEO equity, backlink power, and organic traffic. Every blog post, every course page, every resource download would be building authority on two separate properties instead of compounding on one. For a startup with no existing web presence, that's a significant disadvantage to build in from the start.
Beyond SEO, the user experience argument was equally strong. A visitor who lands on the services side of the site and discovers the Academy in the same journey is far more valuable than one who has to find two separate websites. The Academy and the services reinforce each other — a business that hires Wordings for content strategy might also send their marketing team through the Academy. Separating the two sites removes that connection entirely.
And practically, two sites means two codebases, two deployments, two content management systems, and double the ongoing maintenance cost for a startup that doesn't need that overhead.
Most importantly, the Academy is where the business currently makes most of its money. Keeping it prominent on the main site — not exiled to a subdomain — gives it the visibility it deserves while the services side of the business grows.
I presented this reasoning to the client directly. They came around quickly. The Academy became an integrated pillar of the main site, anchored under `/academy` with its own long-form page, course catalogue, mini-products shop, student outcomes section, and free resources band.
Design Approach
With the structure agreed, I designed the site around a single principle — every page should do three things at once: communicate clearly, build trust, and create a path to conversion.
The information architecture maps to that principle directly. The homepage serves as the routing hub for the entire site, replacing what would traditionally be a standalone services page. Each of the four service pages is designed as a self-contained landing page — capable of receiving paid traffic independently without relying on the homepage for context. The Academy page is a single long-form page with anchor-linked sections, so a visitor can browse courses, explore mini-products, and read student outcomes without leaving.
Portfolio and testimonials are embedded within each service page rather than consolidated on a single portfolio page. This keeps social proof contextually relevant — a CV client reads CV testimonials, not a generic mix of every client type.
Contact lives in the global footer on every page, with inline CTAs mid-page on every service page and a floating WhatsApp button site-wide. There is no standalone contact page. The decision was deliberate — reduce friction at every possible exit point rather than routing people to a separate destination to convert.
The design system uses three brand colours — Deep Navy, Teal, and Gold — with DM Serif Display for headings and DM Sans for body copy. The visual direction is professional, warm, and editorial. The Academy uses a teal-forward variant of the palette to signal it as a distinct sub-brand within the same family.
Feedback came from five stakeholders across two rounds. I documented every action point, grouped them by what required client input and what was within my control, and worked through both tracks in parallel to avoid blocking myself on items waiting for client response.
The Build
The site is built on Next.js App Router with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. Sanity CMS with an embedded Studio handles all content that the team needs to update post-launch — blog posts, team bios, course content, and resources. The contact form runs on Resend with rate limiting via Upstash Redis.
The AI Content Checker — an unusual feature for a writing agency — is powered by the Gemini API. The concept is simple: a visitor pastes their document, the tool flags AI-generated content, and the result creates a natural opening for the agency to offer their human writing services. It is a lead generation tool disguised as a utility.
Sanity's Studio is embedded directly at `/studio` so the Wordings team can manage content without leaving their own domain. Every key page uses server-side incremental static regeneration for SEO performance.
What's Next
The site launches before the end of 2026. Outstanding items include final pricing confirmation for Academy courses, facilitator bios and photos for course detail pages, real work sample assets to replace placeholders, and client-provided social and contact URLs.
When it goes live, it will be Wordings Digital Agency's first web presence — built from a blank brief into a full-stack product that positions both sides of the business clearly, keeps the Academy at the centre of the story, and gives the team the tools to grow it independently after handoff.