27-Page Dental Template Customisation

Client (end user): Pauley Family Dentistry — a US general dental practice
Engagement: White-label template customisation for a US marketing agency
Delivered: December 2025 · 177 days · 77 hours · 27 URLs · on schedule

The Craft of Template Customisation

27 pages across 177 days of dental template customisation on WP Engine — 27 QA iteration rounds logged in Redmine before the agency signed off. Eight service pages were added mid-build without content documentation, requiring builds against template defaults and backlog tracking for later rounds. A high-priority SVG icon transparency fix cycled through four QA rounds before it closed. The site was small; the sustained precision across every iteration was not.

Snapshot

The Brief

A US marketing agency delivered us a Figma design for Pauley Family Dentistry and a deployment target on their branded WP Engine template system. The agency had already done the upstream work: client requirements, design audit, hosting setup, and content sourcing via Google Docs per page. What they needed was a development team to map the Figma onto the template faithfully and sustain the QA loop for as long as the agency’s review process required.

The ask was operationally open-ended in a way that a fixed-scope rebuild is not. Customise the template to match the Figma page by page. Flag findings back into the shared backlog. Return every iteration only after the agency-side reviewer had confirmed the delta was resolved. The 27-page scope was the entry point; 177 days and 330+ tracked issues is what it took to close it out. Some pages were added to the sitemap mid-build without accompanying content documentation, forcing the team to build against template defaults and log content gaps into the shared backlog for later resolution.

What the agency needed to guard against here was a dev shop that equates “done” with “built.” On a templated engagement with 16 service pages — each with its own Figma frame, its own content block layout, and its own variation from the template default — the build is only complete when every page matches the design at every breakpoint and every QA item has been reconciled. A team that stops iterating when the site looks roughly right leaves the agency carrying a QA backlog they now own. The 330-item backlog on this project is not a sign of rework — it is the record of discipline. When a dental site’s service pages carry insurance logos, payment-option widgets, and patient-facing copy that has to be accurate, the QA loop is where precision is delivered, not where it is checked.

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. A clean template customisation is not “build once, review once”. It is “build, QA, adjust, QA, adjust”. Of the 48 tasks tracked on this project, 27 were QA iterations — individual rounds where the agency flagged design deltas, we reviewed, fixed, and returned the build for another review. Behind those rounds was a much larger reconciliation: the agency tracked 330+ items across two issue-backlog tabs (220 SEO findings and 110 CX findings), of which 279 were marked Completed at the time of handoff.

The principle behind this is simple: on a templated build, the QA loop is where the value is delivered. A shorter QA cycle is a weaker match to the design, not a faster delivery.

3. Customisation without drift. 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. Insurance-logos blocks, payment-widget sections, and doctor-bio card layouts were customised inside the page scope. No customisation propagated into the agency’s shared template components, which means this project’s changes did not affect any other site built on the same template. Rather than stall on deliverables the agency had not yet provided, pages were assembled against the default template and content gaps tracked through the backlog for later rounds.

4. Cross-device verification. Customisations were QA’d against Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on desktop, tablet, and mobile viewports — the standard agency breakpoint set. Each QA round covered the pages affected by that round’s design deltas, not the whole site, which is how a templated build stays efficient without losing coverage.

27 QA iteration tasks across a 125-day active span, each returned only after the agency confirmed the delta was resolved. One high-priority fix — SVG icon transparency — cycled through five separate rounds before it closed. That pace held all the way to the last task: not because the engagement was efficient, but because the work required it.

Operational Integrity at handoff

The first internal QA pass on the initial build caught a missing favicon, a missing logo, and a site-wide font rendering failure — the Adobe Fonts (Typekit) integration had not loaded, leaving every heading unreadable across all 27 pages — all before the build reached the agency. 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.

Results

The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s Figma was implemented against their branded template across 27 pages and 8 templates, over 177 calendar days, inside the 77-hour estimate.

Process

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 and fixes
• Anna Polunina — template customisation support and QA
• Timur Arbaev — developer support on later customisation rounds
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)

The agency held the end-client relationship throughout. All customisation requests moved through the agency’s shared backlog; Pauley Family Dentistry did not interact with our team directly. Each iteration round was released only once the agency-side reviewer confirmed the changes were resolved to spec.

For agencies with a branded template system