What we shipped
- Rebuilt typeamedia.net from WordPress onto EmDash, a Cloudflare agentic-first CMS. You still log in and edit as you would in any CMS, but you can also publish through Claude Code.
- Deliberately over-built for our size: production and staging environments, enterprise-grade security, proper rollback rules, and server-side analytics. Visibility reporting, Kit.com email and Truendo cookie banners all wired straight in.
Why we built it this way
Part procrastination and part curiosity. As we make our agency more agentic the natural bottlenecks for tasks change over time. A perennial issue is implementation. Even with the best client team in the world, writing business cases and developer tickets is a slow process and even then, actually getting developer time to implement optimisations is a tricky challenge.
If we are asking our clients to do something, we want to be able to show them that we've implemented it in our own business first so that's why we took what seemed like completely unnecessary action in moving our site from Wordpress to Emdash.
Rebuilding the site let us feel every little piece of friction and experience all the natural bear traps and pitfalls first hand so we could design a system and process around it and then weigh up the pros and cons of having an agentic first website vs a standard CMS.
When building a B2B website either with AI or with Wordpress, there are 2 traps.
- You use a wordpress theme so its both uninspiring and hard to maintain as you are at the whims of the plugin and template developer
- You get AI to design for you so it looks the same as everyone else and understanding the code base is like unwinding a box of Christmas lights.
So regardless, if it's AI or its wordpress - it's going to look a bit naff and you will accumulate some level of technical debt. So moving to AI would need to solve some other issues like being able to design new pages at the speed of thought, find and patch SEO issues at scale, remove tech debt and make the site faster and more usable, allowing us to ship more ideas and products than before.
We did this by using some atomic design principles. We had Claude design help us rebuild our existing design using brand guidelines and current website designs, starting with the smallest items on the site like buttons, headings and fonts and building up from there.
This allowed us to avoid the usual AI tells like eyebrow headings, lovely but overused serif fonts, creamy paper tones and a bunch of other artefacts that scream AI.
How it benefits clients
- To be clear, we don't offer website development or design. We are a digital marketing company and that is not currently part of our offering. However, we can now comfortably recommend agentic websites and help spec them out without any issues.
- Flat static HTML makes it faster and more secure, and every integration slots in cleanly rather than bloating the page.
- We can run live tests on our site and use real world data to help shape our frameworks and deliverables. Where before we could only do a test on a burner domain or via one or two pages, I can edit every page on the site with a single prompt.
What's next
Governance. On our own site we can talk to Screaming Frog's MCP through Claude Code and fix technical issues on the fly but that approach is completely inappropriate for clients and professional services. Any process where an agent can touch something in a live environment needs locked down with proper guardrails and governance.
Technical innovations
Building from zero means the WordPress freebies, default metadata, Open Graph, canonicals and some accessibility, are not automatic, so we had to be very deliberate about wiring them into the build. As we had lots of web development guidelines from working with clients over the last 9 years, that was a trivial consideration for us. In return we got flat HTML that Claude Code and Screaming Frog's CLI can read and fix conversationally.
One side benefit was the site generated brand new leads on the first day of going live as Google re-crawled the entire thing and put us into a few SERPs that we normally wouldn't be in. More interestingly, our AI clicks jumped and then settled back down again. Luckily for us that jump resulted in a new business lead and proved the concept that we were testing with real commercial consequences.
How it fits the agentic journey
Much of the agentic AI builds would be classed as a cutting edge way of using AI in our everyday work. Whilst innovation is great and something to be encouraged, it increases the likelihood of things breaking. By taking a 'dogfooding' approach we get to try out these innovations in safe sandboxed situations with a tiny blast radius.
This grounds us in building agents that have real world value that is proven in real commercial environments before rolling it out to our clients.