Designing a Content System That Scales Beyond a Portfolio

Context

Most personal websites start with hardcoded content directly inside components. This works initially, but quickly becomes difficult to maintain as the site grows.

Updating content requires code changes, deployments, and careful coordination between structure and presentation. Over time, even simple updates become unnecessarily complex.

This problem is not unique to portfolios. It appears in any system where content needs to evolve independently from application logic.

The Problem

Traditional approaches often introduce friction:

• Content tightly coupled with UI components
• No clear structure for managing different content types
• Difficult to scale into blogs, case studies, or structured narratives
• Lack of flexibility for non-developer editing

The result is a system that works early but slows down iteration over time.

Design Goals

The system was designed with a few clear goals:

• Separation of content and presentation
• Scalability across multiple content types (blog, case studies, pages)
• Static generation for performance and simplicity
• Git-based workflows for version control and traceability

System Architecture

The core idea is simple: treat content as a first-class system.

Content Layer

All content is stored in structured files:

• JSON for UI-driven sections (hero, stats)
• MDX for rich content (articles, case studies)

Example structure: