SENDMERLIN.COM
SendMerlin.com: A Marketing Site With No Build Step
The challenge
SendMerlin needed a marketing site that could earn organic traffic from day one, without a build pipeline to maintain next to the product itself. I set a design reference and rebuilt it 1:1 with my own content and typography, then treated the blog as a product feature: SEO posts written up front and released on a schedule with no manual publishing.
The build
The site is an Orbit CMS static build: templates plus content render to 15 HTML pages that Cloudflare Pages serves as-is, with no build step. Typography is Newsreader and Inter, the closest Google equivalents of the reference's commercial fonts, self-hosted.
- Nine SEO blog posts seeded at launch on a weekly drip schedule
- Client-side publish dates hide future posts until their day arrives
- OG images rendered at 1200 by 630 through headless Chrome
- TrackTrendy analytics injected by Orbit at render time
The results
www.sendmerlin.com deploys straight from a Git push: no bundler, no framework runtime, nothing to break at 2 a.m. Copy changes happen in the Orbit portal and re-render to static HTML. The blog keeps publishing itself weekly, which means the marketing site compounds while I build the product.