Case study · Headless WordPress · Live at al-burhaan.org
Al Burhaan
Al Burhaan is an Islamic institute, and its website had to carry that weight properly, without shouting. So the site opens the way a manuscript does: gold calligraphy writes itself onto a parchment background, and you read a verse before you see any navigation.
- Year
- 2026
- Type
- Headless WordPress
- Frontend
- Next.js on Vercel
- Live
- al-burhaan.org ↗
The live site, top to bottom. This is a recording, not a mockup.
The brief
Most religious organisations get websites that look like noticeboards. Al Burhaan wanted the opposite — a site whose restraint communicates as much as its content. And the team had to be able to update departments, programmes and announcements themselves, without touching code.
The build
WordPress holds the content (departments, pages, settings), and everything the visitor sees is a hand-built Next.js frontend served from Vercel. The opening is the signature: the institute’s gold emblem appears first, then Qur’anic calligraphy writes itself across the parchment before the page settles. We made it slower than a normal page load on purpose, because hurrying it would have cheapened it.
The signature moment
A site that opens like a manuscript
The emblem, the verse and the translation arrive in sequence, timed roughly the way a page gets illuminated: one element at a time, each given room. The sequence plays once per visit, so a returning reader never sits through it twice.
Details worth noticing
Edited in-house
The institute updates departments and announcements in WordPress themselves. Day-to-day changes don't need a developer.
Fast pages
Pages are pre-built and served as static files from a network near the visitor, so there's nothing to wait for except the calligraphy.
Hardened
Strict security headers, a locked-down admin subdomain, and DDoS protection in front of everything. The public site has no login page to attack.
Room to grow
New departments and programmes slot into the existing design, because the content model was planned for more than launch day.