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★ Case study · Lot No. 02 ★

Ranch Road Media

The site sells it. The portal delivers it.

A new website for an Austin social media agency that works with local businesses, competition BBQ teams and community groups across the Hill Country. We designed the brand system, wrote every page, built it natively, and connected it to a client portal we also built and host.

ranchroadmedia.com
Ranch Road Media home page: Make your brand the talk of the town, beside three phones showing real client posts
RR Social proof on a phone, showing a client post exactly as it will appear in the Instagram feed

At a glance

Client
Ranch Road Media, social media management in Austin and the Hill Country
What we did
Brand system, copywriting, design, build, client portal, hosting and care
Built with
WordPress, Breakdance and HeadspinUI, plus RR Social, a plugin we wrote
Live site
ranchroadmedia.com ↗
  • 11 pages, from home and pricing to two local pages and the portal
  • 5 screen widths designed and checked, 1440 down to 390
  • 0 code blocks or custom scripts on the pages
  • 4 platforms sold: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube

The brief

Local, a little loud, and easy to trust.

Ranch Road Media sells done-for-you social media to people who are busy running something else: a shop, a venue, a nonprofit, or a cookoff team on the road most weekends. The site had to feel like the work they sell, current and fun, while making a careful buyer comfortable handing over their brand.

Most visitors arrive from an Instagram or Facebook bio on a phone, so we designed the phone layout first and treated desktop as the bigger canvas. The brand is logo gold and espresso brown, fun and professional, with no cowboy styling, even with "Ranch Road" in the name.

What we built

A home page ordered like a sales conversation: what you do, can I see it, what do I get, how will I know what is happening, does it work, and what happens next.

A hero that shows the product

An animated heading beside three phones showing real client Reels and posts, with floating like and follower chips. Real posts replaced stock photos, so the proof is honest.

Phones built from elements

The Instagram, Reels and TikTok screens are real text, icons and images, not flat screenshots. The owner swaps a photo or caption in seconds.

The glow-up slider

A before and after of a real client's Instagram grid, shared with permission. Prospects drag it and see the difference for themselves.

Pricing with real numbers

Starting prices, add-ons and an open FAQ on cost and contracts, so visitors qualify themselves and the audit call is about fit.

Local pages that earn their place

"Who we work with" covers BBQ teams, shops, venues and clubs. A Hill Country page names the towns they shoot in, from Dripping Springs to Fredericksburg.

A form that qualifies gently

It asks about the business and platforms with an optional budget range. Every submission is emailed and stored in WordPress, so no lead is lost to spam.

The client portal

RR Social

The biggest worry when hiring an agency is losing control of your brand. So we wrote RR Social, the WordPress plugin behind Ranch Road Media's client portal. Clients preview each post exactly as it will look, approve it or ask for changes from their phone or straight from the email, and see their calendar, Instagram grid, results and monthly PDF reports.

  • Preview posts exactly as they will look on each platform
  • Approve from a phone or right from the email
  • Plan a calendar that shows local events
  • Report results in plain English and a monthly PDF

Screenshots on this page use fictional demo businesses and are labeled that way on the live site. No real client data is shown.

Proofs

Every post gets a proof.

Before anything goes live, the client sees the post exactly as it will appear on Instagram or Facebook, on a phone or a desktop. They approve it, ask for changes or leave a note for the team right from the proof. When a post needs more than one person to sign off, the proof shows who has approved and who is still waiting.

RR Social proof on desktop: the Instagram post preview, Approve and Request changes buttons, and a comment thread between the client and the agency
The proof on desktop: the post preview, Approve or Request changes, and the conversation with the team beside it.
RR Social proof on a phone, showing the post exactly as it will appear in the Instagram feed
The same proof on a phone, where most clients approve their posts.

Inside the portal

Everything in one place

Client portal home showing posts waiting for approval, what is scheduled and last month's results
Portal home: what needs approval, what is scheduled and how last month went.
Content calendar with scheduled posts and local events
The calendar shows posts alongside local events, so nothing gets planned on top of a big weekend.
Results page explaining reach, engagement and follower growth in plain language
Results in plain English, not a wall of charts.
Brand kit page with the client's colors, fonts and voice notes
Brand kit: colors, fonts and voice, so every post sounds like the client.

How we worked

We set the brand up as two 12-step color scales with fluid type and spacing, then built every page from those tokens, so one change updates the whole site. Each page was written as a sales conversation before any layout, built from shared native classes, then checked at desktop, two tablet and two phone widths.

Every new page stayed a draft until the owner approved it. Search was built in from the start: one target search per page, local business markup, a clean sitemap and real heading text, even in the animated hero.

  • Breakdance
  • HeadspinUI
  • Rank Math SEO
  • FluentSMTP
  • RR Social portal
  • LiteSpeed Cache
  • Daily backups
  • Managed updates

★ Lot No. 06 ★

Need a site that sells?

And maybe the tool that delivers it too. Tell us how your business works and we will build around it.

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