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Case study · WordPress rebuild + in-house back office

Tahoe Engaged

A regional wedding directory and magazine, moved off WordPress onto a custom site the team runs from one back office.

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Tahoe Engaged: WordPress rebuild + in-house back office
The live site as it looks today.
Client
Tahoe Engaged, Lake Tahoe
Type
Directory and magazine rebuild, admin suite, newsletter tools
Stack
Node + SQLite, server-rendered pages, runs on the client's own cloud server with a mirror on ours
Status
Rebuild complete on the client's server; domain cutover is the next step
Where
Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada, USA (delivered remotely)

The brief

Tahoe Engaged had years of content on a WordPress site: 86 vendor listings, close to a hundred stories, and a mailing list of several hundred contacts, all held together by a stack of paid third-party tools for forms, RSVPs and email.

The team wanted a faster site they actually owned, with none of the old URLs breaking, and a back office where the whole business lives instead of five logins.

What shipped

  • Every vendor, story and photo gallery migrated; every old WordPress URL kept
  • A members map on the home page and a clean directory with vendor categories
  • An admin suite: Events with RSVP, an Audience module mirroring the mailing list, Campaigns that send and drive RSVPs, Forms and lists, a membership application
  • A newsletter builder that assembles an issue from member and story photos, with three templates, three layouts and an animated GIF maker
  • Luminary Collective program pages and a Daily Juice roundup
  • 'Twiggy', a directory-only AI guide with a guard that never quotes prices, and a brand-voice module so every AI helper writes in the magazine's tone

How it was built

The site is server-rendered Node with a SQLite database, deployed to the client's own cloud server with a mirror on ours. There is no CMS subscription and no plugin stack to keep patched.

Two rounds of team notes were shipped on both servers within days, including background gallery imports, events-archive recaps and a calmer home-page animation.

Where it stands

  • Forms, RSVPs and campaign email run in-house instead of through separate paid tools
  • The team edits events, vendors, stories and newsletters from one dashboard
  • The site runs on infrastructure in the client's name

One lesson

Keep every old URL. A rebuild that loses ten years of links is a redesign that costs you rankings; this one kept them all.

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