Nomad Nick is where I share stories, photos, and knowledge from my travels — built the way I always wanted a travel site to actually work.
Earlier versions went through a long parade of WordPress themes: each one tweaked, extended, and eventually broken by too much complexity. The pattern was always the same — a plugin for this, another for that, each writing to its own database table, the whole thing held together by friction rather than design. Content and system were always at odds.
This version uses Sanity as a headless CMS, with React and Node.js on the front end. The key decision was to replace plugin dependencies with custom integrations — so the site operates as a coherent system, not a site that happens to have a plugin ecosystem bolted onto it. Data flows cleanly, the editing experience in Sanity is fast enough to actually invite writing, and the architecture can hold complexity without sprawling.
The results have been solid. The site can be as layered as the content demands and as simple as it needs to be — which is the thing that always eluded the WordPress iterations.