26-Page Dental Template Customisation
26 URLs for a new Salisbury NC dental practice, built across 16 templates in 21 days — 12 hours of build, 84-item checklist closed before agency handoff.
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Rebuild the site on a new stack. Implement the spec. Don't improvise. Hand it back ready for cutover.
Client (end user): Trident Smiles — a new US dental practice in Salisbury, NC
Engagement: White-label template customisation for a US marketing agency
Delivered: January 2026 · 21 days · ~12 hours · 26 URLs · on schedule
The Craft of Template Customisation
25 interior pages of a new Salisbury, NC dental practice, built against a partial Figma — the homepage design wasn’t final at kickoff, so the agency deferred it and asked for the interior pages first. Sixteen reusable templates across 25 pages, an 84-item agency launch checklist before handoff, 21 days total, ~12 hours of build time. The discipline was running the full QA cycle at minimum viable scale without treating a light hour-count as a licence to skip steps.
Snapshot
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| End-client industry | Healthcare — General Dentistry |
| End-client | Trident Smiles (new dental practice, Salisbury, NC) |
| Engagement | White-label template customisation for a US marketing agency specialising in local-business websites |
| Project Type | WordPress template customisation (agency’s branded template + per-page Figma design on Kinsta) |
| Scope | 26 URLs — homepage (deferred), about, services lander, 11 service pages, doctor bio, blog lander + post, contact, smile gallery, and 6 policy / payment pages |
| Timeline | 21 days (26 Dec 2025 – 16 Jan 2026), on schedule |
| Effort | ~12 hours — development, QA iterations, and project management |
| Team | 3 specialists |
| Templates | 16 reusable templates provided by the agency, all applied across the 26 pages |
| Tech Stack | WordPress · Elementor · Kinsta hosting · Figma-driven per-page design · Rank Math · agency AutoQA (Links / Email / Content AI / visual checks) · Site Checker (xaverPRO QA plugin) |
| QA discipline | 84-item launch checklist aligned with the agency’s pre-handoff protocol |
| Review rounds | ≈2 review rounds across the 21-day calendar window |
| Per-ticket effort | 4 internal Redmine tickets · median 49m / P75 10h per ticket |
| Launch checklist | 84 items, signed off before cutover |
The Brief
A US marketing agency delivered us a Figma design for Trident Smiles and a deployment target on their branded Kinsta-hosted template system. The agency had already done the upstream work: design audit, hosting setup, content plan. What they needed was a development team that would map the Figma onto the template faithfully and hand off the pages for content population.
The ask was operationally tight. The homepage design and colour scheme were not yet final, so the agency asked us to postpone the homepage and build the interior pages first — pages that could move to the content team while the homepage remained in design. The 26-page scope had to be delivered fast enough that the content pipeline did not stall.
What the agency needed to guard against was a dev shop that would treat a ~12-hour engagement as a rush job — skipping template documentation, skipping cross-link checks, or leaving placeholder content in policy pages because “there’s no time.” A dental template in active use serves multiple practices at once; one project’s customisation cannot leak into the shared layer. That discipline does not scale down with the hour estimate.
Risk context. A new dental practice in Salisbury, NC needed its service pages built before the homepage design was ready — a phased handoff where the pages would go to the agency’s content team first and the homepage would follow later. Mid-build, the agency simplified five service-page slugs, dropping the
-salisburygeo-suffixes to shorter paths. The risk was not redirect volume — the practice had no legacy traffic — but internal-link discipline: every menu reference, breadcrumb path, and cross-link had to be reconciled to the new slugs before the partial site was handed off. A dev team that updates the sitemap but misses a menu item leaves the agency with broken paths on a site that has no existing audience to absorb the error.
How We Did It
1. Figma-as-contract, template-as-canvas. The Figma file was the design spec. The branded template was the underlying page structure. Our job was to reconcile the two page by page — where the template’s default layout matched the Figma, we kept it; where the Figma required a deviation, we customised. No design decisions originated on our side.
2. QA cycle at template-customisation scale. Even on a ~12-hour engagement, the QA loop is where the value is delivered. The agency’s 84-item launch checklist governed the handoff gate: status codes, phone-number accuracy, URL structure, trailing-slash consistency, contact-form notifications, visual checks at 1920 px and mobile, and content-language sanitization. Each item was verified before the build moved to the agency’s post-handoff review layer.
3. Customisation without drift. Over the course of the project, every change we made to the branded template — whether to a page layout, a section component, or a style token — was documented against the Figma reference. No customisation leaked into the template’s shared components, which means this project’s work did not degrade the template for the next site it would serve.
4. Cross-device verification. Customisations were QA’d against desktop, tablet, and mobile viewports — the standard agency breakpoint set. Each page was checked at 1920 px, 1280 px, and mobile resolutions, with attention to header size, mobile menu behaviour, and form-element tap targets. On a light engagement, this coverage is not a luxury; it is the difference between a site that looks correct and one that merely looks built.
The tension was a homepage design not yet final at kickoff and five service slugs simplified mid-project. We resolved both without stalling the content pipeline: interior pages built and handed off while the homepage remained in design; every menu reference and cross-link reconciled to the new slugs before the partial site left staging. A new practice with no legacy traffic cannot absorb a broken internal link at launch.
Operational Integrity at handoff
Pre-handoff QA caught a 404 on the /cosmetic-dentist-salisbury/invisalign/ sub-page and flagged an unconfigured contact-form notification before the agency saw the build — the same pass that verified trailing-slash consistency and menu-reference reconciliation across the five service-page slug simplifications made mid-project. Pre-handoff QA ran through Site Checker — see our QA discipline for the categories and the fail-zero gate. The agency’s own QA layer — their tools, their process — ran post-handoff and surfaced issues into the shared backlog for our fix loop until they signed off.
Customisations stayed in the per-client overrides; the agency’s shared template components were not modified.
AutoQA gates (Phone-Number / Links / Email / Content-AI / visual) — agency-managed — were configured on this project. The agency’s AutoQA pass ran post-handoff as part of their sign-off process.
Results
| Metric | Outcome |
|---|---|
| URLs delivered | 26 — 1 homepage (deferred), 1 about, 1 services lander, 11 service pages, 1 doctor bio, 1 blog lander, 1 blog post, 1 contact, 1 smile gallery, and 6 policy / payment / legal pages |
| Templates applied | 16 of 16 reusable templates built and mapped across the 26 pages |
| Launch checklist | 84 items aligned with agency protocol |
| URL changes reconciled | 5 service-page slug simplifications (removing -salisbury suffixes) with updated menu references and internal links |
| Timeline | 21 days, delivered on schedule |
| Effort | ~12 hours — no overrun, no scope creep |
| Team | 3 specialists |
| Hosting handoff | Staging on the agency’s Kinsta template environment |
The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s Figma was implemented against their branded template across 26 pages and 16 templates, over 21 calendar days, inside a ~12-hour estimate — with the homepage held back for a second-phase handoff once the design was final.
Process
| Phase | Duration | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Brief & estimation | ~1 day | Figma reviewed, template access confirmed, scope agreed including homepage deferral |
| Customisation development | ~2 weeks | Page-by-page template customisation to match Figma; slug changes reconciled |
| QA iterations (ongoing) | ~2 weeks | Checklist verification; each item closed before agency handoff |
| Fix rounds | ~2 days | Post-review corrections and link reconciliation |
| Delivery | phased | Interior pages handed off for content population; homepage deferred to second phase |
Development and QA ran concurrently — this is characteristic of template-customisation work, where no “QA phase” closes cleanly; the loop runs continuously until the agency signs off.
Team
Delivery team
- Nikita Tumasevic — lead developer (template customisation and Figma-to-layout mapping)
- Pavel Sazhin — QA iterations, estimation, and checklist verification
- Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)
Agency-side project management, design, and client communication remained with the partner agency throughout. Our team was invisible to the end client. All customisation requests came through the agency’s shared issue backlog; nothing about the build was visible to Trident Smiles directly. Each QA round was closed only after the agency-side reviewer confirmed the delta was resolved.
For agencies with a branded template system
If you’ve handed off a light-scope template build to a dev partner and received it back with broken internal links, unconfigured forms, or placeholder content still live — the inverse is what we do on every engagement, regardless of hour count. Send a sample brief or your agency’s 84-item checklist equivalent; we will return a fixed-hours quote and confirm what the pre-handoff gate covers before any work begins. No cost. No obligation to proceed.
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Site Checker runs before the agency sees anything.
Before handoff, every staging build runs through Site Checker — the WordPress QA plugin we built and maintain. It is a fail-zero gate: nothing goes to the agency with an open failure. Warnings are reviewed and judged non-blocking; the agency gets a clean slate to run their own QA layer against, not a staging site with known issues in the queue.