Global Bridge: Company Formation Site on Next.js and Payload CMS (UAE)

Problem :

The company site lived on Framer: a monthly subscription for a template the team itself found weak, no proper content management and no real blog. Articles could not be drafted, planned or tagged, every edit went through the page builder, and the firm kept paying for a platform it had outgrown.

Solution :

I moved the site to its own stack: Next.js 15 (App Router) for the pages and Payload CMS 3 built into the same app as the admin panel. The design is new from scratch: a white canvas, a dark photo hero, a floating pill navigation, one accent colour and a sticky stack of launch stages. Every page kept its old address one to one, so search rankings carry over: home, services with four service pages, pricing, about with the team and certificates, contacts, the blog and four legal pages. The CMS gives the team drafts with autosave, scheduled publishing, an SEO tab with a snippet preview, redirects, live preview, categories, editor roles and forms whose submissions land in the admin. Blog articles can be drafted by AI and are saved as drafts for a person to check and publish.

My Role :

End to end: art direction and UI, the photo series for the site, front-end and motion, the CMS data model and the admin styling, the AI article generator, SEO and deployment.

Process :

I captured the old site page by page and moved every block word for word instead of retelling it, then built the design system and the pages in Next.js, with Payload collections for posts, categories, media and users. The admin was restyled to feel like the Framer CMS the team was used to, translated into Russian and checked on desktop and on a phone. Then came work for phones: no React state updates inside scroll or animation loops, smooth scrolling (Lenis) switched off on touch screens, photos compressed with light copies for small screens, and passes on contrast and tap targets at 390, 768 and 1440 px.

Working in the CMS :

The editor works in a Russian-language admin panel styled after the Framer CMS the team already knew. An article has a title, a cover picked from the media library with previews, a category and a rich text body with headings, lists and checklists; the page address is built from the title by itself in Latin letters. Drafts save themselves while you type, each save goes into the version history, and a finished draft can be scheduled to publish on a chosen date.

The SEO tab fills in the search title, description and social image from the article and shows how the result will look in Google; live preview opens the real article page next to the form while you edit. Requests from the site forms land in “Submissions”, phones and messenger links are changed in “Site settings”, and an old address gets a rule in “Redirects”. A separate page writes a draft article on a given topic with a large language model, and it waits as a draft until a person checks it. Editors handle articles, media and submissions; adding users and changing site settings is left to the owner.

Outcome :

A site the company fully owns, with no page builder subscription. The sitemap, robots file and metadata of every page come from the code, and the team edits texts, plans articles and reads form submissions in one admin panel. 14 pages and 35 blog articles are live at globalbridge-cms.vercel.app.

Tech Stack :

Next.js 15 (App Router) + React 19, Payload CMS 3 (Lexical rich text, SEO, form builder and redirects plugins, drafts and scheduled publishing), PostgreSQL on Neon, media in Vercel Blob, hand-written CSS, Lenis, GSAP and Motion for animation, Embla carousels, an LLM API for article drafts. Hosted on Vercel with a daily cron for scheduled posts.