Haluk Mesci Archive Website

Haluk Mesci — a 50-year advertising archive with its own CMS

• Client: Haluk Mesci, advertising professional since 1973 (Manajans, Markom/Leo Burnett, KLAN EURO RSCG, Mahi Mahi)
• Platform: Custom code: Node.js, Express and MySQL, with our own admin panel
• Our role: Everything: design, development, moving the content over from WordPress, hosting and maintenance
• Scale: 320+ pages, a menu of about 300 items in five sections

The challenge

Haluk Mesci's site is a personal archive of half a century in Turkish advertising: campaigns, articles, translations, talks, interviews, press clippings and photographs. It had outgrown a WordPress and Elementor build that was slow and hard to edit. He needed a site that shows the archive well and that he can run himself, without knowing any code.

What we built

• A CMS written from scratch, with an admin panel kept deliberately simple for a non-technical owner.
• A block-based page editor. Pages are built from blocks: title with image, text, photo galleries with captions (one to five columns), ready-made image layouts that always line up, two columns side by side, video, PDF, career timeline, buttons and a contact form. A live preview updates on every save.
• Safety nets. Page history and a one-click undo for destructive actions; a drag-and-drop menu editor for about 300 items that warns before an item drops out of its section, with its own menu history.
• A migration from WordPress. Our own scripts moved hundreds of pages, images and the full menu out of Elementor, so the archive did not have to be rebuilt by hand.
• A media library that optimises every uploaded image automatically and can be searched by file name.
• SEO with AI. Page titles and descriptions can be filled in by AI from each page's content; every page has a clean canonical address and the sitemap updates itself.
• Reliable hosting. Automatic updates with a database backup before each one, a health check and automatic rollback if the site does not come up, plus weekly backups of the database and all media.
• A contact form with email notifications and an inbox in the admin panel, and a maintenance mode for working behind the scenes.

The result

An archive of more than 320 pages, from the 1970s to today, that Haluk edits himself. He adds and rearranges pages on his own, and page history, undo and automatic backups make any mistake easy to reverse.