José Neves Foundation: a Webflow rebuild shaped around editorial control

The José Neves Foundation did not want a completely different website. They wanted a website their team could actually manage.

When they first contacted GOMO, they had already searched for Webflow specialists in Portugal and arrived with a clear reason for the move. Their existing site, built with Gatsby and Contentful, looked good and had a strong visual language, but the editorial workflow was too disconnected from the people who needed to use it. The frontend felt separated from the backend. Everyday changes depended too much on developers. And with a large content archive already in place, the central question for Fred was simple: would everything survive the migration?

A rebuild driven by editorial reality

The client provided a complete Figma file, with all pages already designed. The goal was not to rethink the brand or redesign the experience from scratch. It was to rebuild the site in Webflow while preserving the quality of the existing Gatsby implementation.

That made the project more precise than a typical Webflow build. The new site had to feel familiar to returning visitors, keep the same level of animation and interaction, and give the internal team a much easier way to manage content after launch.

From the first conversations, Webflow made sense to Fred. The problem was not that Gatsby and Contentful were poor tools. It was that the setup did not match their day-to-day editorial needs. They wanted the frontend and backend to feel connected, visual, and manageable by the team responsible for the content.

Preserving the experience without preserving the friction

The old Gatsby site had a distinctive interaction layer: scroll-triggered movement, staggered transitions, animated menus, custom hover states, modals, toggles, and a homepage slider with a strong editorial role.

Recreating that inside Webflow required a careful split between native platform behaviour, custom CSS, Webflow Interactions, and GSAP. Simple hover states stayed lightweight in CSS. More precise sequences, staggered animations, and scroll-based effects were handled with GSAP where Webflow’s native tools did not offer enough control, at the time.

The result was a Webflow site that stayed close to the visual and interactive quality of the previous Gatsby version, without keeping the same editorial dependency behind it.

Migrating the archive without turning it into manual work

The content migration was one of the biggest risks.

The Foundation had more than 250 pages and articles in Contentful, and they were understandably concerned that not everything could be moved into Webflow cleanly. Instead of treating the migration as manual content entry, GOMO used Contentful’s schema API to extract the existing structure, then cleaned and transformed the data through Parabola before importing it into Webflow CMS.

That process migrated the vast majority of the existing content automatically. A small amount of content was left for the Foundation’s team to add directly inside Webflow, but the heavy work was handled through a structured migration rather than weeks of manual copying.

Building a new content system for Biblioteca FJN

The new Webflow site also introduced something the old site did not have: Biblioteca FJN.

This required a more advanced CMS architecture than a standard marketing website. The library needed articles to be organised and filtered by theme, type, and tag, while keeping filter combinations consistent for users.

At the time, Jetboost was the most practical solution for search and filtering in Webflow. GOMO combined it with custom JavaScript and a CMS structure built around 27 collections, including multi-reference fields and supporting collections where Webflow’s native relationships needed help.

The goal was not just to make filters appear on the page. It was to make a large educational content library feel usable, searchable, and maintainable inside Webflow.

A Webflow site the team could keep using

The final site migrated 250+ pages, recreated the existing animation language, introduced a new filtered library, and gave the José Neves Foundation team a CMS they could use directly.

Pages that previously required developer support became editable inside Webflow. The homepage slider became manageable through CMS entries. The content archive was preserved. And the new site launched in four months with no significant post-launch issues.

This is the kind of Webflow development where the platform choice matters because it removes operational friction. The value was not simply rebuilding a Gatsby site in Webflow. It was keeping the quality of the experience while making the website easier for the team behind it to own.