Redefining Tangent's Digital Presence

Tangent is a privately held digital consultancy founded in 2001, with a distributed team of around 90 experts across the UK, Spain, South Africa, Pakistan, and other regions. The company delivers future-ready digital products across four core areas: Strategy & Consultancy, Customer Experience & Design, Technology, and AI & Data. Despite its growth, Tangent’s previous website no longer reflected the scale or sophistication of the business, operating on a dated monolithic architecture with limited flexibility and minimal support for modern content or experience delivery.

Overview

Tangent is a global digital consultancy with ~90 people across strategy, design, technology, and AI. Its website told a different story, a legacy monolith that no longer reflected the company's capabilities, global reach, or brand positioning. The site needed more than a refresh; it needed a rebuild that matched the ambition of the business.

As Front-end Lead on an internal team of three developers, I owned the full rebuild from architecture through to delivery. I balanced competing priorities across leadership, design, and marketing stakeholders, defined the site architecture, introduced motion-led storytelling as a core design language, and ensured full WCAG AA compliance throughout.

How we built it

We migrated to Umbraco Heartcore, adopting a headless CMS architecture with REST and GraphQL APIs and global delivery via Cloudflare CDN. The front end was built on Next.js 15 (App Router) and deployed on Vercel. A catch-all routing strategy gave the content team the freedom to define URL structures directly in the CMS.

Framer Motion and Lottie delivered high-performance animations without bloating page weight. HubSpot and Google Analytics were integrated for lead tracking and performance insight.

Tech stack

Next.js 15
TypeScript
GraphQL
Framer Motion / Lottie

2.8×
increase in lead submissions
98
Lighthouse performance score
~45%
faster page load times
+40%
increase in time-on-site

There's more to this story...

Balancing competing stakeholder priorities across leadership, design and marketing while still delivering to a high technical standard. Internal projects carry a different kind of pressure, everyone has an opinion and there is no external client dynamic to create natural boundaries.

Framer Motion and Lottie were chosen specifically for their performance characteristics. Animations were optimised to run on the GPU where possible, assets were kept lean and we were disciplined about what motion actually added value versus what was decorative overhead.

Full independence. The catch-all routing strategy means the content team can create new pages with any URL structure directly from the CMS without raising a development ticket. That alone reduced publishing cycles by 3x.

The legacy site buried conversion points and made it hard for visitors to understand what Tangent actually did. The rebuild clarified the proposition, improved user journeys and made contact and enquiry touchpoints far more prominent and intentional.