Why we rebuilt norml.studio on Next.js and Sanity

When people open norml.studio today, they're looking at the same site we shipped in Webflow — the same type, the same grid, the same motion. What they can't see is that underneath, almost nothing is the same. Here's why we rebuilt it, and what the move actually bought us.

The problem with a frozen design

A Webflow export is a gorgeous, static artifact. It looks exactly right the day you ship it. The trouble starts the first time someone on the team wants to change a sentence, swap a case study, or add a teammate — and the only way to do it is to reopen the designer's file and re-export the whole site.

For a studio whose entire pitch is that we make change cheap for our clients, shipping ourselves a site where change was expensive felt wrong.

Pixel-exact, but CMS-driven

Our hard rule for the rebuild was simple: not one pixel moves. We kept the real Webflow CSS and markup and reproduced every component class-for-class, then wired the content to Sanity behind it. The result is a site that is byte-for-byte the original design, with every word and image now editable.

Concretely, that meant three commitments:

• Reusing the exported CSS verbatim instead of rebuilding the design system from scratch.
• Matching Webflow's grid node ids so the layout engine behaves identically.
• Reading content uncached from Sanity, so a publish shows up on the very next page load.

What fresh content really costs

The one place we let the architecture diverge from a textbook setup was caching. Next's data cache kept serving stale content across deploys, so we read Sanity uncached. Pages became dynamic — a real tradeoff — but for a brochure-scale site, predictability was worth more than the saved milliseconds.

We made the same correctness-first call elsewhere on the site, including the work you'll find in our case studies.

Would we do it again?

Without hesitation. The rebuild took a few focused days and turned a frozen marketing site into something the whole team can keep alive. The lesson isn't always use a CMS — it's that the cost of changing your own work is something you design for, not an afterthought.

The cost of changing your mind should be a line item you control — not a surprise you discover later.