.NET site migrated to Astro and Sanity
Duende's marketing team went fully autonomous in 46 days
Duende had a custom .NET codebase that only engineers could touch. We rebuilt it from scratch in Astro and Sanity, handed full ownership to marketing, and went live on time, despite receiving the initial designs 3 weeks late.
Background
Duende builds developer identity infrastructure. Their team moves fast. Their website didn't.
The existing site was a custom homegrown .NET application. To publish a blog post, someone in marketing had to write it in a .md file and share it with a developer, who would then upload it to the site. Campaigns were being delayed. Opportunities were being missed. And every small content update was consuming engineering time that should have been spent elsewhere.
Duende was in the middle of a brand revamp. A brand agency had been engaged to lead the visual direction, delivering 4 initial page designs as the starting point for the new site. We had to design and build the rest of the site from there.
Challenge
Marketing team had zero control over the website, every change required a developer
Blog posts were published by sending .md files to the dev team
Page content updates were communicated to developers
Campaign velocity was severely limited by this dependency
3-week delay on initial designs threatened the entire go-live timeline
Solution
A full website rebuild using Astro paired with Sanity CMS, with custom deployment workflows that give the marketing team complete autonomy. No developer required for content changes.
Results
46 days to go live
100% Core Web Vitals scores across the board
Full marketing ownership, blog posts, landing pages, product pages, all self-serve
Zero developer dependency for day-to-day content and campaign operations
The timeliness of responses, commitment to deadlines, and high bar for quality set Lucky Media apart - they were truly exceptional.
Tyler Parramore
CEO @ Duende
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Talk to our founders. Let's figure out what's actually slowing you down.
Challenges
Duende's website problem wasn't cosmetic. It was structural, and it was getting more expensive every month.
A marketing team blocked by their website
The existing .NET website had no content management layer that a non-developer could operate. Updating a product page meant telling a developer what to change and waiting. Publishing a blog post meant writing it in Markdown, saving it as a .md file, and sending it to the dev team to upload manually. For a marketing team trying to run campaigns, launch new pages, and respond to the market quickly, this wasn't a workflow, it was a bottleneck with no exit.
Campaigns slowing down
Every delayed page update, every blog post waiting in a developer's inbox, every landing page that couldn't go live without a ticket. These weren't abstract inefficiencies. They were missed windows. A campaign tied to a product launch, a conference, or a competitive moment has a short runway. When your website can't keep up, you don't just lose time. You lose the moment entirely.
A 3-week design delay with a fixed deadline
Duende gave us a 2-month window to rebuild and launch the entire website. Three weeks into that window, the initial designs hadn't arrived yet. For most teams, that's a project re-scope conversation. For ours, it was a scheduling problem to solve, not a reason to push the deadline.
Our solution
We rebuilt the website from the ground up, and we built it for the people who actually run it day to day.
Full marketing autonomy, built in from day one
We didn't just hand Duende's marketing team a CMS login. We built the entire system around what they actually needed to do. Product pages, solution pages, landing pages with embedded HubSpot forms, blog posts, webinars, and case studies. Every content type was modeled, componentized, and made self-serve.
Everything was built on a flexible, component-based content structure. Pages are assembled from a library of pre-built sections. Marketing can create a new landing page, add a HubSpot form, publish a case study, or update navigation. Entirely on their own, without developer assistance.
Why this matters: Marketing autonomy isn't a feature, it's the outcome. When your marketing team controls the website, campaign velocity is limited only by ideas, not by engineering availability. That shift has a direct impact on the pipeline.
Using Astro with Sanity CMS
We proposed Astro as the framework because it delivers exceptional performance out of the box, static-first rendering, minimal JavaScript, and a clean developer experience. We paired it with Sanity CMS because it offered exactly what Duende needed: a headless CMS that developers can configure precisely and completely, while being approachable enough for a non-technical marketing team to use confidently.
Why this matters: The previous system forced a choice between developer control and marketing usability. The Astro + Sanity stack eliminates that trade-off entirely. Developers configure the schemas, the content models, and the structure. Marketing operates freely within that structure, no code, no tickets, no dependency.
Automated deployments with staging preview
We built custom deployment workflows so that Duende's marketing team could push the site live on their own. We also set up a dedicated staging environment, so the team can preview every change before it goes live. Review it, approve it, ship it. No guesswork. No surprises.
Why this matters: Giving a non-technical team deployment access without guardrails is a risk. Giving them nothing is worse. The staging environment closes the loop: marketing gets full independence, with full confidence in what they're shipping.
Design expansion under pressure
Duende hired a design agency that provided 4 initial page designs. We needed to design and build the rest of the site from there. While designs were still being finalized, our developers were already building approved sections in parallel. Our designer moved quickly to expand the design system across the remaining pages, keeping the visual language consistent while unblocking development at every stage.
Why this matters: Most projects stall when designs are late. Ours didn't. By running design and development in parallel across approved sections, we protected the timeline without sacrificing quality or consistency.
The Lucky Media team did an exceptional job on this project. As a many-time CMO, I have worked with dozens of agencies and resources over the years. I can't recall an agency that I liked working with more than Lucky Media.
The team did what they said they would do, hit every deadline, had excellent technical expertise, and provided stellar creative direction. They also had exceptional communication, were fast, and offered valuable strategic direction when needed. Lucky Media provided a very rare combination of skills.
Robert Phillips
Interim CMO @ Duende
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We partner with a limited number of brands each quarter to ensure senior-level attention on every project.
The results
Duende launched a new website, on schedule, with a marketing team that now runs it entirely on its own.
46 days to go live: The designs arrived 3 weeks late. We had 2 months total. We finished in 46 days. No deadline extension. No compromises on scope.
100% Core Web Vitals: Performance, accessibility, best practices, all at 100. A fast, high-quality website that performs as well as it looks.
Marketing team fully owns the website: Product pages, solution pages, landing pages, HubSpot-integrated pages, blog posts, webinars, and case studies. All of it is now created and published by marketing, without a single developer involved.
Staging previews and self-serve deployments: The team can preview changes before going live and deploy when they're ready.
Improved site structure and navigation: We restructured the information architecture and navigation alongside the rebuild, making it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and easier for marketing to manage as the site grows.
46
Days to go live
100%
Core Web Vitals
Full
Marketing autonomy
Yes
On-time delivery
Why it worked
Most website projects fail marketing teams in one of two ways: they build something technically impressive that marketing can't touch, or they build something easy to use that developers can't extend. We refused both.
The key was treating Duende's marketing team as the primary users of the system. Every content type, every component, every workflow was designed around the question: can marketing do this on its own? The answer, across every part of the site, is yes.
The timeline pressure and the 3-week delay made execution harder. We ran design and development in parallel, protected the critical path, and hit the date anyway.
Let’s chat
We partner with a limited number of brands each quarter to ensure senior-level attention on every project.
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