Fourteen client sites, and nobody files a copy ticket

Bellwood & Vane builds marketing sites for software companies and medical practices across North Carolina. Nine people, one office above a bike shop on Glenwood Avenue, and until last year, a support queue that was mostly other people’s sentences.

“We would launch a site we were proud of, and then spend the next six months changing it one ticket at a time,” says Tessa Bellwood, who founded the studio in 2017. “A new headline. A new photo of the new hire. A button that had to say Book a visit instead of Book an appointment. Every one of them went through a developer.”

The quarter they moved everything

The studio already built every site in Laravel with its own set of Blade components. That made the move smaller than they expected. Each component got a YAML file listing its fields, the pages became lists of sections, and the clients got a login to the editor.

They moved fourteen sites between January and March, two of them in a single week. The longest one, a dental group with forty-one pages, took a developer six days. Most took two.

What the clients do now

Clients open their own site, click the thing they want to change, and type. Images come from the media library or an upload. When they are happy, they press Publish, and the change lands in the site’s repository as an ordinary commit that the studio reviews the next morning.

Copy-change tickets dropped by 91% in the first sixty days. The ones that remain are requests for something new: a section the site does not have yet, or a page with a different shape.

What the studio does with the time

The studio’s developers now spend most of their week on new work. They have built a library of thirty-two sections of their own, shared across every client, and a new site starts from that library rather than from a blank folder. Kickoff to launch for a ten-page site is now three days.

“We charge for the sections and the strategy now, not for typing,” Tessa says. “It is a better business, and honestly a better job.”