50 States of Freedom
A heritage travel guide that powers a vision
- Client site
- Sanity CMS
- Client-run
Skills
The guide's home page, desktop
A fifty-state guide to Black heritage travel, structured so the client keeps publishing without ever needing a developer.
Challenge
The client had done the hard part, years of research into heritage sites across all fifty states, and had nowhere to put it. The risk in a project like this is not the launch, it is month four: a beautiful site that quietly goes stale because every update means emailing whoever built it. The site had to be handed over in a state where the client could keep it alive alone.
Action
I designed and built the site in Next.js with Sanity as the CMS, and spent most of the modelling effort on the content structure rather than the pages. States, sites, and stories are separate document types with real relationships, so the client adds a location and it appears everywhere it belongs without touching a layout. Forms run through Tally so response handling never becomes a maintenance burden, and the whole thing deploys on Vercel straight from the repository. Editors get a Studio shaped around the way the content is organised, not a flat list of everything.
Result
Live and handed over, with the client publishing new entries themselves. The content model is the deliverable that matters: because the structure matches how the research is organised in the client's head, adding to the site feels like adding to their notes rather than operating a tool.