THE THING WE BUILT:

Deck Builder

I know I’ve said something along these lines a million times: The best marketing sites function a lot less like a static brochure and a lot more like an app. And I know what you’re thinking: But what does that actually mean?

Well, let me show you.

For years at Township, we built decks for clients: curated slideshows of work that applied to them. Stage the house, if you will. We’d highlight relevant client projects, pick the order, send a link.

We also featured case studies on our website, in case potential clients go looking there too.

Those marketing assets were maintained in two separate places.

That’s… not so efficient, is it?

But rebuilding your presentation software doesn’t feels like the best option. Are we really gonna rebuild Figma?

...until suddenly the thing you already have (the website, the content, the media) kind of is the presentation.

And maybe all it needs is a few features like full-screen mode.

So we built a thing.

Deck Builder in Action

How It Works

We realized our “source of truth” for our portfolio of work first and foremost lives on our website. So we made the site an API, so the website can talk to other apps.

Next step: the deck builder reads from that API and turns it into something you can actually use in a sales call.

Our decks are customized to individual clients, so the Deck Builder needs to be just as flexible.

So we created our own taxonomy by project, category, and even newsletter.

Example: /0203 might be project 2, then project 3.

/01M02 might be project 1, all medical (M) work, then project 2.

Open the link and you get a full-screen slideshow: keyboard navigation, client logos, video or stills, one-liner copy pulled straight from the API.

No duplicate content entry.

No “wait, which deck did we send them?”

Update a summary on township.agency, and the deck reflects it.

Add a category in the API, run a build step, and the deck builder picks up the new letter code.

Notes from Building

1. The API is the secret sauce, we just weren’t treating it that way.

We didn’t need a new CMS or a second database of project blurbs. The website already structured portfolio data for case studies, filters, and internal tooling. The deck app is a different presentation of the same records. That’s the “marketing site as app” idea in practice: the site isn't pages, it’s an interface to your own data.

2. Deck URLs are a tiny programming language.

Two-character tokens, read left to right: project slot, category sweep, newsletter issue. Parsing is finicky — M35 is not "category M + project 35" unless the remainder is a valid project code. We learned to treat the URL segment as a token stream, not a fixed pattern. Worth it: a link like /01MD02 is simple, shareable, and encodes real intent.

3. Integration over replacement.

We didn’t rebuild the portfolio. We attached to what existed. The deck builder, the public slideshow, and the admin picker are thin layers on top of endpoints and content we are already maintaining for the marketing site. Less to go stale. Fewer questions about “which version of the Figma deck is correct?”

4. The bigger picture

A good marketing site isn’t just something you look at. It’s something your business runs on: proposals, decks, case studies, newsletters, all fed from the same well.

That’s what we mean when we say a “marketing site is an app.” Not because we just add more features. Because the same platform and content can power a website, a sales deck, a client portal, and whatever comes next.

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