A Pilot with Ambition: Event Microsite for CSS

How it started: a long-standing client

A few years back, we worked with CSS on the CSS Blog. That blog was retired a couple of years ago, when its articles were folded into the main website. A shame, really, because it was a genuinely good project. We know from conversations that other agencies kept pointing to it as a reference for successful corporate blogs. Hearing that, of course, makes us pretty happy.

CSS, it seems, was happy with that work too. Otherwise they wouldn’t have come back to us at the end of 2025, this time with a new idea: a microsite for events built around the CSS Coin.

What the CSS Coin is all about

The CSS Coin is CSS’s own currency. Customers can buy or earn coins and then redeem them at more than 1,000 partner locations across Switzerland. That’s how the model works today.

CSS wanted to start organizing events together with selected partners, events you could also pay for with coins. It was a pilot, meant to test whether the format had legs. Our job: build a microsite, fast, where those events could be found.

Our solution: WordPress, with a twist

We built the microsite on WordPress. That’s home turf for us, which is exactly why we wanted to set ourselves a challenge: could we deliver a genuinely excellent solution in such a short time, without cutting corners on quality, performance or the editorial experience?

What made it possible: years of experience and the base templates we keep refining. Instead of starting every project from zero, we build on a solid foundation. That lets us move quickly without trading away quality.

For the event detail page, we took our cues from the main CSS website and built a fresh, clean layout that sits naturally within the brand.

Patterns and overrides: maintenance without the headaches

We knew from the start that the number of events would stay manageable. Even so, we set up the CMS so that maintaining content is easy. The trick is a combination of “patterns” and “overrides”: the editorial team works with custom fields but sees, right there in the editor, exactly what visitors will see later.

Best of all: there’s nothing in the layout itself that can break. So the editorial team can focus entirely on the content, without worrying about nudging something out of place or breaking the design.

Trilingual, with AI in the backend

To avoid maintaining every event three times over, we built an AI translation integration with DeepL straight into the WordPress backend. The editorial team enters an event in one language, the translations are generated automatically, and anyone can fine-tune them by hand where needed. That saves a real amount of time, which matters all the more on a pilot, where efficiency counts.

The final tally

The microsite is clean, lean and fast. In the Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed tests, we hit 100 points for performance and best practices. On accessibility we landed just shy of 100, since the brand color costs us a fraction on contrast; everything else is fully met. The SEO basics would be solid too, but they don’t matter here: the site was password-protected and never indexed.

Which is, as it happens, exactly the point. Even when a project is “just” a pilot or an internal initiative, we want to deliver quality. Call it professional pride. We don’t subscribe to the “it’s only around for a while, so good enough will do” school of thought. Build it well once and you’ll build it well the next time too.

Conclusion: even a pilot deserves a solid foundation

The pilot won’t continue in its current form. That’s simply part of trying new things, and it’s exactly what pilots are for. What we take with us is a stronger foundation for future projects, and a collaboration that was a real pleasure from start to finish. A big thank-you to the team at CSS for the straightforward, friendly and collaborative partnership. We’re already looking forward to the next idea!