Notes on building client sites
What we have learned building and handing over websites for other people, and the decisions behind the way Contentive works.
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Content control, not design control
Every client-editable site tool lets you change the words by also letting you change the layout — Contentive makes that constraint structural, not a permission.
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The unbilled hours
Small unbilled client fixes add up to real money every month, and the fix is removing the possibility, not charging for it or training harder.
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Moving a WordPress site to Contentive: what transfers and what doesn't
Posts, pages, media, taxonomies and slugs transfer from WordPress. Plugin data and theme customisations don't — here's how to plan around that.
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Should you charge a retainer for site maintenance?
A retainer turns unbilled fixes into revenue, and it also prices a problem instead of removing it. Both sides of the argument, properly.
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Why we don't have a drag-and-drop editor
A drag-and-drop canvas produces layouts only that canvas can read. We compose structured blocks instead, and we think that's the right trade.
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Why there's no AI chat box for building your site
There's no prompt box for building sites in our Studio. You point your own agent at our tools instead — better context, and no markup on tokens.
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Every plugin is a decision you have to keep making
A plugin isn't a one-off decision. It's a subscription to someone else's release schedule, paid in your attention, on every site you ever shipped.
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How to write a handover that doesn't come back to you
A handover document isn't the fix. What to write down, what to restrict, and what to agree about who changes what.
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What to do when a client breaks their own website
Triage first, blame never. What to do in the hour after a client breaks their site, and the conversation to have the week after.
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Building a CMS an AI agent can actually drive
What it takes to let an agent drive a CMS without guessing: self-describing tools, structured errors, scoped tokens, and no second code path.
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Why our content model is a graph, not a table
Documents are nodes and references are edges. Why a graph beats a table the moment a client asks for the same content somewhere else too.
See how Contentive compares to WordPress, Webflow and the headless CMSs →