Case Study

Off WordPress, onto a real operations system.

A real client, a real business, a real migration — not a demo. An animal talent & casting agency's entire website and day-to-day operations, rebuilt from the ground up.

Currently in active use — live and working today
By the numbers

Not a redesign. A rebuild.

1,831
Profiles migrated
13,153
Photos migrated
71%
Smaller hosting footprint
Weeks
Not quarters
The situation

What was actually broken

This business was running its entire operation — talent applications, casting decks, client bookings — off an aging WordPress site with no real backend. Everything that should have been automatic was manual.

Before

  • Casting decks built by hand — screenshot, arrange, export, repeat
  • An outdated WordPress core and an unlicensed plugin powering every public form
  • No real screening on new talent submissions — anything could go live, unchecked
  • Calls going to voicemail with no way to triage what actually mattered
  • Every message — bookings, follow-ups, confirmations — sent out one at a time, by hand

After

  • A one-click Casting Deck Generator producing a finished, branded PDF
  • Migrated fully off WordPress onto a modern, directly-managed system
  • An AI safety and quality review on every submission, with a hard safety gate
  • A voice AI agent answering, triaging, and logging every call to a live dashboard
  • Automated notifications for bookings, approvals, and confirmations
What got built

The full system, end to end

Full website rebuild, off WordPress

Every page, form, and profile carried over exactly — nothing missing, nothing renamed — on modern, secured infrastructure.

Custom internal operations dashboard

Built from scratch — talent profiles, job creation, customer tracking, and casting decks all in one system.

One-click Casting Deck Generator

Pick a job, add the talent, generate a fully branded, print-ready PDF — replacing a manual screenshot-and-export process entirely.

AI voice agent for inbound calls

Answers, triages urgency, and summarizes every call to a live dashboard — nothing depends on a voicemail getting checked.

Automated safety & quality review

Every new submission and profile edit passes a real AI screening pass before going live — a check that didn't exist before at all.

Real year-end tax slips & payment tracking

What's owed to each performer, tracked to the job it came from, with official CRA T4A slips generated straight from the records.

Found and fixed before it mattered

A full security audit performed during the migration found — and fixed the same day — a data-linking gap that could have exposed one customer's information to another, a secret key stored insecurely, and an internal tool reachable without login. All three closed before the new system ever went live to real users. This is the kind of check a template site or a stock plugin never gets.

Real, dated work

Not a recollection — a timestamped record

Every session below is reconstructed directly from commit history, not estimated from memory.

Day 1

Project kickoff — full site rebuild shipped, first ops-dashboard classification work stood up.

Day 2

Claim-your-profile flow built end-to-end, then hardened same-day in a security audit; casting automation backbone shipped.

Day 3

Homepage rebuilt from scratch, real mobile device fixes, a redesigned credits page.

Day 4

Full submission and profile-editing system, a data-visibility fix restoring hundreds of hidden profiles.

Day 5

The biggest single day — live breed data, the full Casting Deck PDF generator built and hardened, safety gates closed.

Day 6

Full sitewide mobile audit, casting-deck validation, real-device testing pass.

Day 7

Customer contact system, auto-approve controls, bulk actions, admin/staff access separation.

Have a business like this?

If your business is still running on WordPress, spreadsheets, and manual follow-up, this is exactly the kind of system that replaces it.

Get in touch