Dotcampus

Dotcampus is a project built together with graphic designer Marzia Bianchi, who created the design. Technologically it's a WordPress site with no complex architecture; the challenge lay elsewhere: giving the client the ability to manage visually rich blocks on their own, and quickly.

The client

Dotcampus describes itself as the ecosystem for those who want to explore, create, study, work and stay in Rome. It is a business & student hotel created by Side Asset Management, a group founded in 2019 to manage and regenerate educational and residential infrastructure: a building of about 5,500 m² over nine floors, with hotel, student and long stays, coworking, meetings and events, the restaurant The Roof and a Technogym-equipped fitness club with a light spa.

Architecture and technologies

Every section of the design became a custom Gutenberg block, enriched with ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) fields for text, images and variants. Each block's template reproduces the design at the reference widths, while the fields expose to editors only what makes sense to change. So whoever updates the site picks blocks, composes and reorders them freely, and the layout still stays the approved one.

My work

A demanding design made manageable

Marzia's design is deliberately unconventional, and that's what makes the site recognisable. The technical difficulty wasn't the single layout, but making complex blocks editable without letting an edit break the composition, on desktop and mobile alike. Much of the work was deciding what to make flexible and what to fix in code.

The outcome

The Dotcampus team creates and edits pages and events on their own, in minutes, without going through a developer. Complexity stays hidden in the block code, while the dashboard only shows simple fields: that's how I see WordPress, a tool built to measure for the people who use it every day.