Case study: a bespoke website and custom CMS for Tenacity

The client

Rebecca Phillips is a business coach and the founder of Tenacity. She specialises in growth, helping business owners push through challenges and build the momentum they need to succeed. She brings a great deal of hands-on experience to her coaching, and the name Tenacity reflects how she works with the people she supports.

This was a significant moment for Rebecca. She was stepping out on her own for the first time and needed a website that matched the quality of her coaching and gave her a confident, professional presence from day one.

We have had a long-standing relationship with Rebecca, which made this project a genuine pleasure to work on. We were able to experiment, try ideas, and shape the site together.

The brief

Rebecca needed a website that did several things at once. It had to look polished and reflect her brand. It had to be easy for her to manage herself, without depending on us for every small change. And it had to capture enquiries and build an audience as she grew her new business.

What we built

We built Tenacity using our current technology stack, combining Claude Code, GitHub and Vercel. This gives a fast, secure and reliable website with a modern foundation.

The part we are most pleased with is the content management system. Rather than relying on an off-the-shelf platform such as WordPress or Squarespace, we built Rebecca a bespoke CMS directly into the back end of her own website. She logs into a secure admin area that is unique to her site and can change the things that matter to her, including colours, fonts, text and images. She does not need technical knowledge to keep her site current, and she does not need to wait for us.

This was an exciting build for us. Adding a custom CMS into the back end of the site, rather than bolting on a third-party tool, gave us full control over how it works and how her data is handled.

Capturing and owning her data

The site includes contact forms and a subscriber sign-up. When someone gets in touch or signs up, their details are collected and held within Rebecca's own CMS. This means her enquiry and subscriber data sits in one place that she controls, and it can be exported to an email tool such as Mailchimp when she wants to run campaigns.

Bringing the brand to life

We wanted the site to feel like Rebecca, not like a template. The design uses a mix of her own photography alongside selected stock imagery, which keeps it personal and authentic.

We also built in some small, considered details tied to her brand, including animated pink dots that add a sense of life and movement without getting in the way of the content. These little moments give the site personality and make it feel crafted rather than generic.

A site that is built to last and easy to maintain

This was an efficient way of building a fast and secure site that looks fantastic and is genuinely engaging to use. Just as importantly, it is something Rebecca can update and change very quickly and very easily, so her site can grow and evolve as her business does.

Where we are now and what comes next

The site is live, and we laid solid search engine optimisation foundations from the start. Every page has a clear H1 title, a meta title and a meta description. Each page has a featured image, favicons are set up, and all images have alt tags. These are the unglamorous but important basics that give a site a healthy foundation in search and make it accessible and easier for search engines to understand.

The next phase builds on that. We have started researching what people actually search for when they look for a coach like Rebecca, so her content can be shaped around real demand and genuine search intent. From there, the focus moves to content creation and to building Rebecca's authority in her field through external signals such as a Google Business Profile, her LinkedIn presence and social media. The aim is to establish her as a recognised and trusted voice in business coaching over time.

This work is ongoing, and building genuine authority takes time, but the foundations are in place to support it.

A personal note from Jim

I should add something personal here. I have attended several of Becky's coaching courses myself over the years, and I have found them genuinely useful. They have gone a long way towards helping me shape the direction of Okapi. So when we talk about her experience and the value she offers, that is not just something we are saying for a case study. I have felt the benefit of it first hand.

In Rebecca's words

[Placeholder for a quote from Rebecca. A sentence or two on how she finds the site, how easy it is to update herself, or how it has helped her launch would work well here.]