Fera Science is a DEFRA and Bridgepoint joint partnership operating across food safety, crop health, ecotoxicology, and environmental research. It is a regulated environment. The work it publishes — certification data, pesticide residue testing, food authenticity analysis — carries legal and reputational weight. The website is not marketing collateral. It is infrastructure.

When I joined as sole in-house designer, the digital estate had grown to over 1,000 pages across two domains with no coherent architecture, no design system, and no internal design function. My remit was to rebuild it.

The brief, in practice

Working directly with Only (Manchester) on brand and design, alongside Fera's internal teams across science, marketing, and the executive, I drove the end-to-end redesign and rebuild of the Fera web presence — including recommending and successfully making the case for Sanity as the organisation's CMS platform of record. That meant owning the project from information architecture through to post-launch analytics, with no creative director and no internal team to defer to.

The new site reduced over 1,000 legacy pages to around 200, restructured around how users actually navigate a scientific services organisation rather than how the org chart was arranged. Every page was written, designed, and QA'd against Fera's tone of voice and the constraints of a regulated sector.

The stack

Following a structured evaluation of eleven CMS platforms, Sanity was selected and adopted organisation-wide on my recommendation. Working with James at Only, I authored Sanity schemas and coordinated block-level component delivery across dozens of service pages spanning food safety, crop science, NRL accreditation, cannabinoid testing, and more — built on a Next.js architecture.

Alongside the CMS build I resolved critical GDPR and consent mode compliance failures across both domains, audited and rebuilt 90+ GTM tags across two containers, and established a working analytics infrastructure across GA4, HubSpot, and Search Console — bringing the organisation into compliance and giving the marketing function meaningful visibility for the first time.

A consumer-facing certificate verification portal — Certified by Fera — was built separately in Webflow, integrated with Make.com and Airtable, allowing customers to verify product certifications without internal resource overhead. The Fapas webshop, a separate e-commerce platform, was managed independently by AYKO.

What this required

Managing a project of this scope inside a 500-person regulated organisation means navigating institutional complexity as much as design complexity. Stakeholders ranged from brand strategists at Only to research scientists with no web production experience to the executive team and CEO. Translating between those groups — maintaining momentum, managing sign-off, and producing work that functions inside an institution rather than beside it — was as much the job as the design itself.