DOCFLiX.site

The Challenge

Build a production-ready documentary journalism platform capable of handling bilingual content (English and Bengali), heavy video embeds, and complex editorial workflows — while maintaining sub-second page loads. The client needed a CMS-driven site that editors could update without developer intervention, with a dark cinematic aesthetic that matched investigative journalism.

The Solution

• Deployed Next.js 16 with App Router for server-side rendering and static generation — every article page is pre-built at deploy time, giving sub-100ms initial loads
• Integrated Sanity headless CMS with real-time collaboration so multiple editors can work simultaneously without conflicts
• Built a subdomain-based bilingual routing system (en.docflixsite.site / bn.docflixsite.site) so each language has clean canonical URLs
• Designed a dark cinematic UI with warm gold accents — letting video thumbnails and photography breathe without visual competition
• Implemented lazy-loaded video embeds, intersection-observer-driven image loading, and route-level code splitting to keep initial JS payload under 100KB

Key Decisions

• Sanity over Strapi/Contentful — GROQ queries are more precise than GraphQL resolvers for fetching exactly what each page needs
• Subdomain-based i18n instead of query params — cleaner SEO per language, avoids duplicate content issues
• ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) for new articles — editors publish content that goes live without a full redeploy

Results

• Consistent sub-2-second Largest Contentful Paint across all pages
• 100 on Google Lighthouse performance (mobile and desktop)
• Bilingual content management without developer intervention
• Zero-downtime deploys via Vercel's edge network
• Article pages rank in top 5 for long-tail investigative journalism queries within weeks of publication