Case Study: Building Overland Ready, a Review Site Editors Can Run Without a Developer
How I designed and built an evidence-based gear review site with Next.js and Sanity CMS, including the problems I solved, the decisions behind them, and the lessons you can apply to your own content site.
Vincent Inferido··4 min read
On this page
Overland Ready is a gear review site for car campers and overlanders, focused on honest, evidence-based buying guides for first-time and budget-conscious buyers. I designed and built it end to end.
- Live site: overland-ready-eta.vercel.app
This case study walks through the problems, the decisions, and the lessons, most of which apply to any business that publishes content: blogs, product catalogs, menus, listings or guides.
The challenge
A review and affiliate site has three jobs that pull in different directions:
- Publishing must be easy. Reviews and product links change all the time. If every update needs a developer, the content goes stale and the site dies.
- Trust must be built in. Readers (and affiliate programs) expect clear disclosures, an editorial policy and an explanation of how products are evaluated. A review site without these looks like an ad farm.
- It has to be fast and look credible, on phones first, because that's where most readers arrive from search.
The solution at a glance
| Need | What I built |
|---|---|
| Easy publishing | A Sanity CMS editor embedded in the site at /studio, where editors add reviews and products without touching code |
| Consistent review pages | Dynamic review pages: each review is written once in the CMS and automatically gets its own page and a place in the review index |
| Trust and compliance | A site-wide affiliate disclosure banner, plus Disclosure, Editorial Policy, Testing Methodology, Privacy and Terms pages |
| Affiliate links that don't break | All product links built from one configurable affiliate ID, so changing it updates every link at once |
| Speed and credibility | Next.js with a custom design system, deployed on Vercel |
Key decisions (and why)
1. A headless CMS instead of a traditional website builder
The content (reviews, products, ratings) lives in Sanity, a headless CMS, while the site itself is built with Next.js. This separation means:
- Editors get a clean, purpose-built editing screen with the exact fields a review needs.
- The public site stays fast, and its design isn't limited by a theme.
- Content could later feed other channels (newsletters, apps) without rebuilding it.
Lesson for your business: if your team updates content often, invest in an editor designed around your content, not a generic page builder.
2. The editor lives inside the site, but stays separate from it
Sanity Studio runs at /studio on the same project, which is convenient. Early on, though, the public site's header, footer and disclosure banner were also appearing inside the editor. I fixed this by giving the public site and the editor separate layouts (Next.js route groups), so each has exactly the chrome it needs.
Lesson: small structural decisions like this keep a product clean as it grows. It's much cheaper to separate things early than to untangle them later.
3. Trust pages are features, not afterthoughts
Disclosure, editorial policy and testing methodology pages were built as first-class parts of the site, with a disclosure banner visible across the site. For a review business, credibility is the product.
Lesson: whatever your industry, identify what makes customers trust you (guarantees, policies, credentials, reviews) and design it into the site from day one.
4. One setting for every affiliate link
Instead of pasting tracking codes into every product link, links are generated from a single configuration value. When the affiliate account ID is set or changes, every link updates at once, with no hunting through pages.
Lesson: anything you'd otherwise copy-paste in many places (prices, contact details, tracking codes) should live in one place.
5. A design system, not just a design
The visual style, a bright "Frutiger Aero" look, was turned into design tokens (colors, spacing, typography) in Tailwind CSS. Every page draws from the same system, so new pages look consistent automatically.
Tech stack
Next.js 16 (App Router) · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS v4 · Sanity CMS (Studio, GROQ queries, image pipeline) · Vercel
What I'd do next
If Overland Ready were to grow, the next steps I'd prioritise are:
- Search and filters across reviews (by budget, vehicle type, use case)
- Comparison tables between products in the same category
- Structured data for reviews so search engines can show richer results
- An email newsletter fed directly from the CMS
Takeaways you can use
- Make publishing easy, or your content will stop.
- Build trust into the product, not the footer.
- Keep one source of truth for anything repeated across the site.
- Separate what editors see from what customers see.
- Design a system, not just pages, so the site stays consistent as it grows.
Running a content-heavy business (listings, catalogs, menus, guides or reviews) and tired of waiting on a developer for every update? Send me a message and let's talk about an editor built around your content, or estimate your project.