Cook's Media Group

Cook's Media Group is an independent Australian agency doing strategy, content, and media buying — work that has put its clients in ELLE, Vogue, and Marie Claire. The site fronting all of that was a dated WordPress / Elementor template dressed in orange and purple and stock photography. It read like a builder preset, not like an agency that places people in national magazines.

Keep the brand, replace the machine underneath it. The plan was a clean rebuild on a modern stack rather than another theme swap — a design that could carry the magazine work instead of hiding it. The new tagline set the tone: "Marketing Built for Visibility." The one non-negotiable through the whole move was continuity: the cutover could not cost them email or a minute of downtime.

Rebuilt from scratch on Next.js 16 (App Router) with React 19, styled in Tailwind CSS v4 with Untitled UI and a little Motion, and shipped on Vercel. The orange-and-purple Elementor look was retired for a sophisticated ink / cream / gold editorial system set in Playfair Display — magazine-led, with the real ELLE, Vogue, and Marie Claire placements featured on the site rather than stock imagery.

Live in production at cooksmediagroup.com since June 2026. The DNS cutover was completed with zero email downtime — Google Workspace was preserved throughout — so the business kept running while the front of the house was replaced. Same agency, rebuilt from the studs: a custom Next.js site that finally looks like the work behind it. See it for yourself at the live link.