From Wix to emdash: why we bet on new tech
A client project became the chance to test emdash CMS, Cloudflare Workers, and Astro in one go. The Lighthouse score jumped from 77 to 99 — but that's not the point.
We rebuilt the site for My Messy Workbench — a New Zealand cosplay and 3D-print craftsman — from Wix to a custom emdash CMS stack on Cloudflare Workers. The client wanted the site to look the way the workshop actually feels: dark, precise, craft-rooted. We wanted a client project that forced us to run frontier tech in production.
The stack: Astro 6 as the framework, emdash CMS (a new CMS built on Portable Text and Cloudflare Workers), Cloudflare D1 as the database, R2 for media storage, and Tailwind v4 via @theme blocks. Everything runs on Cloudflare's edge — TTFB under 100 ms from Oslo.
Before and after
The old Wix site scored Performance 77, with a carousel-driven gallery and generic Wix templates. The new landing page delivers Performance 99, Accessibility 93, Best Practices 100, SEO 100 — with real workshop photography, semantic HTML, and copy we wrote ourselves.
But the Lighthouse score isn't the point. The point is that we've now worked through a new stack from scaffold to deploy, documented the gotchas (Astro 6 env pattern, emdash locale auto-filter, Cloudflare subdomain SPF), and can reuse the same setup on the next client project without fumbling.
What this means for you
We run client projects on new tech before recommending it to others. That means when we say "this is the right tool for the job," we've felt where the edges are. You don't get a beginner experiment — you get a solution where we've already made the mistakes.