Custom Build
VantageRoad Partners
Senior strategic advisory firm. Custom design system, bespoke ACF page builder, hand-authored JSON-LD for AI search, and a perfect Lighthouse score across the board.
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The situation
VantageRoad Partners is a strategic advisory firm founded by four senior operators - former executives from S&P Global, National Grid, Meta, and a former Deputy Secretary of State. The site needed to match the room they operate in. Not a consulting template with a color swap. Full-bleed cinematic imagery, confident motion, and a build that would be understood correctly by both traditional search and the AI answer engines now mediating how buyers discover advisory firms.
What I did
Built a fully custom theme on the Forcefield Stratum starter with no page builder dependency at all. Self-hosted Poppins at an oversized type scale, a disciplined plum and navy palette with ACF color controls that keep editors inside the brand system. Every major content block is a full-viewport, full-bleed image section with configurable tint overlays. All motion is hand-tuned CSS, no animation libraries. Built a bespoke ACF flexible-content page builder from scratch with configurable backgrounds, overlays, widths, and four content layouts. Three custom post types for Insights, People, and Work, each with custom shortcodes for card grids. Hand-authored JSON-LD across the site: full Organization schema with eight services as structured Offers, individual Person schema for each partner with prior employer entity linking, a dynamic Person schema generator for the advisory council that stays in sync with the CMS, FAQPage schema, and Article schema on every post. Zero jQuery, vanilla JS, fonts preloaded, hero images prioritized, page-builder assets only enqueued on templates that use them.
Results
Perfect Lighthouse scores across performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. A non-technical team can manage full-bleed section layouts without touching code. Structured data infrastructure built for how the firm will actually be discovered going forward, by search engines and by the AI systems standing in front of them.