RZest Engineers — a Presence build in under three weeks

Overview

RZest Engineers is a structural engineering practice in New Delhi — the kind of firm whose clients decide whether to call based on whether the last ten projects look credible. Their old site was a static one-pager with a project list that hadn’t been touched in over a year, because updating it meant emailing a developer and waiting.

They came to me through a referral wanting a Presence-tier build: a brochure site with a real, browsable portfolio — and, critically, one they could keep current themselves.

The challenge

Three constraints shaped the build: a tight three-week timeline set by an upcoming tender the firm wanted to point prospective clients to, a portfolio that needed to be filterable by project type and sector rather than just listed, and a non-technical team who needed to add new projects without touching code.

The approach

The build started the same way every Presence engagement does: a component library drawn from the firm’s existing brand marks before a single page was laid out, so the site would read as considered rather than assembled. The content model went into DatoCMS — projects, sectors, and case study pages as structured content, not hard-coded markup.

import { defineCollection, z } from 'astro:content';
import { datocmsLoader } from './loaders/datocms';

// Projects are structured content in DatoCMS, not hard-coded pages —
// the client adds a project, the portfolio and filters update themselves.
const projects = defineCollection({
loader: datocmsLoader('project'),
schema: z.object({
  title: z.string(),
  sector: z.enum(['residential', 'commercial', 'infrastructure']),
  completedYear: z.number(),
  heroImage: z.string(),
}),
});

export const collections = { projects };

With the content model settled, the portfolio’s filter-by-sector interaction and the case-study page template were the two pieces of actual custom engineering — everything else was composition of the component library against DatoCMS data.

What was built

• A component library drawn from RZest’s existing brand marks — colour, type, cards, and layout, consistent before the first real page was built.
• A filterable project portfolio, sortable by sector, backed by structured content in DatoCMS rather than hard-coded HTML.
• A reusable case-study page template so each completed project gets its own page without a one-off build.
• Full Open Graph and meta implementation, so project pages preview properly when shared.
• A CMS the RZest team could use directly — no developer in the loop to publish a new project.

Results

The brief was simple to state and easy to get wrong: a site the RZest team could grow themselves, that still looked like it had a firm hand behind it on day one and a year later.