Northwerk Templates
Customizable websites for local businesses, with a real editor you can touch in about ten seconds. Pick a template, click Try the editor, and you are standing inside a working admin on your own private subdomain.
Northwerk Templates is a set of production-grade websites built on Payload CMS and Next.js, shaped around the kinds of local businesses we already work with. Five fully designed demo businesses are live right now, from a photography studio to a custom homebuilder, and every one of them opens into a real editor you can try without talking to anyone first.
WHAT_IT_RUNS_ON
CMS
PAYLOAD CMS 3
FRONTEND
NEXT.JS 16
DATABASE
POSTGRES (ISOLATED)
ISOLATION
PER-VISITOR DB + TLS
LIVE_DEMO_BUSINESSES
Five complete, fictional demo businesses running right now. Browse each one like a customer would, then open it in a real editor from the page itself.
Halcyon
A clean marketing site with work, studio, and contact pages, for any business that mostly needs a credible, editable front door.
Maren Vale Photography
Sessions, portfolio, hours, and booking for a service business whose customers want answers before they reach out.
Provincetown Goods
Collections, product pages, cart, and a persisted demo checkout with simulated payments, the full storefront walk-through.
Stillwater Custom Homes
Model homes, 3D floor-plan tours, communities, and a client-portal preview for buyers mid-build. The flagship template.
Apex Precision Fabrication
Capabilities, industries, and a request-a-quote flow, with a demo that pairs the website to a live Northwerk Platform back office.
WHY_WE_BUILT_THIS
Most small businesses get one of two bad website options.
Option one is a cheap template builder that looks like everyone else's and traps the content in a platform. Option two is a full agency engagement that costs more and takes longer than the business can justify. Both leave the owner unable to actually try the thing before committing.
Northwerk Templates splits the difference: real, owned, professional sites you can edit yourself, and a live sandbox so you can feel the editing experience before any conversation happens.
03_DEVELOPMENT_ROADMAP
PHASE 01
Live, editable demo businesses you can try right now
- Five template types live today: marketing, service business, ecommerce, custom homebuilder, and a manufacturing job shop
- Click Try the editor and get a real Payload admin on your own subdomain in about ten seconds, with a live side-by-side preview
- Edit realistic sample content, then watch it disappear after 30 minutes
CURRENT_STATE
Live demo platform
Five designed demo businesses with public Try-the-editor sandboxes, isolation per visitor, and live preview. This is the same infrastructure a client site would run on.
Best experienced by browsing a demo like a customer, then opening the same site in the editor.
PHASE 02
Your branding, your content, your site
An engagement starts from the template closest to your business: per-business branding, real content migration, and, for businesses that grow into connected operations, the connection points into the Northwerk Platform.
SECURITY_ARCHITECTURE
Every visitor gets a sealed-off sandbox
Each Try the editor session runs as its own Payload process against its own Postgres database on its own subdomain, behind wildcard TLS. Nothing you type is shared with another visitor, and the whole environment is destroyed automatically after 30 minutes. Anti-bot protection keeps the pool available for real prospects.
HOW_THE_SANDBOX_WORKS
The credibility here is in the infrastructure, not the marketing copy. When you click Try the editor, an orchestrator hands you a warm, pre-booted editor process and provisions a fresh database, which is why it is ready in seconds instead of minutes.
ORCHESTRATION
Warm process pool and isolated databases
A Fastify orchestrator keeps a two-tier pool of warm Payload processes, one tier for public visitors and one reserved for prospect demos, and provisions a dedicated Postgres database per sandbox so requests never collide.
ROUTING & RELIABILITY
Wildcard TLS and crash detection
Caddy serves every sandbox subdomain over wildcard TLS, and a heartbeat monitor detects and reaps crashed or expired sandboxes automatically while Prometheus and Grafana watch the pool.