When film and TV production companies approach their website as nothing more than a digital showreel, they're leaving significant opportunities on the table. Yes, the work should be front and centre—but how that work is presented, organised, and experienced makes the difference between a site that impresses momentarily and one that actually wins business.

We've worked on websites for production companies including Park Village and post-production house The Post Arm, and the pattern is clear: the most effective sites don't just display video content, they communicate the unique value of each project and make it effortless for potential clients to understand what the company does best.

Most production company websites follow a predictable template: homepage with a showreel, a grid of project thumbnails, and individual project pages with embedded Vimeo or YouTube players. On the surface, this seems logical. The problem is that it treats every project exactly the same and relies entirely on third-party platforms that weren't designed for professional presentation.

This approach creates several issues:

Generic video players that include branding from Vimeo or YouTube, distracting suggestions for other videos, and limited control over the viewing experience. When you're trying to showcase high-end commercial work, having a Vimeo logo in the corner or related video suggestions undermines the premium positioning you're trying to establish.

Poor video representation on project listing pages. Standard embedded players show a static thumbnail until someone clicks play. There's no sense of movement, pacing, or visual style—the very things that make one director's work distinct from another. Potential clients scrolling through your projects see a wall of still images that could belong to anyone.

Weak project organisation that makes it difficult for the right people to find relevant work. If a creative agency is looking for a director who specialises in automotive commercials, they shouldn't have to scroll through your entire archive of music videos and branded content to find examples. Yet most production sites make this basic filtering impossible or frustratingly limited.

An effective production company website needs to work harder than simply hosting video files. It should:

1. Give Every Project a Distinct Presence

Video content should feel integrated into the design, not dropped into a generic player. For The Post Arm's website, we implemented custom video players alongside animated preview loops that play on hover. This means that even before someone clicks into a project, they can see movement, get a sense of the edit's rhythm, and understand the visual style.

This approach transforms a static project grid into something that feels alive. Different projects can have different treatments—some might benefit from short looping clips, others from carefully selected still frames that change on hover, others from split-screen comparisons that show before-and-after work.

The technical implementation matters here. Using custom video players built specifically for your content means you control everything: the interface, the loading behaviour, the quality settings, the way users navigate through longer pieces. No third-party branding, no distracting suggestions, no compromise.

2. Make Project Organisation Actually Useful

Production companies often work across multiple formats, industries, and creative approaches. A site should make it trivial to filter and find relevant work.

This goes beyond basic tagging. Smart organisation might include:

• Filtering by director, especially for larger companies representing multiple talents
• Grouping by project type (commercial, music video, documentary, branded content)
• Categorisation by industry or client sector (automotive, fashion, tech, FMCG)
• Duration-based filtering (30-second spots vs long-form content)
• Date filtering that helps showcase recent work without hiding the archive

The key is that these organisational systems should feel natural and unobtrusive, not like a complicated database interface. Craft CMS excels at this kind of flexible content organisation. Unlike WordPress, which was originally built for blogging and retrofitted for other purposes, Craft's structure system is designed from the ground up to handle complex, multi-dimensional content relationships.

3. Communicate Value, Not Just Show Work

Here's where many production sites miss the mark: they assume the work speaks for itself. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn't—at least not without context.

Effective project pages include information that helps potential clients understand:

• What the creative challenge was
• What approach the production team took
• What specific capabilities were deployed (special equipment, techniques, locations)
• What the results were (if appropriate)

This isn't about lengthy case studies—it's about giving each project enough context that someone can understand not just what you made, but why you were the right team to make it. The design should support this storytelling, using layout, typography, and image treatment to reinforce the narrative rather than just arranging content in a template.

Many production companies end up with WordPress sites because agencies default to it, or because it's the platform they've heard of. While WordPress powers a huge percentage of the web, it's a poor fit for video-heavy sites that need sophisticated content organisation.

WordPress was built as a blogging platform and maintains that DNA. Its post/page structure is fundamentally limited, and while you can extend it with custom post types and plugins, you're always working against the grain of the system. Want to create a sophisticated filtering system for your projects? You'll need multiple plugins that may or may not work together cleanly. Need custom video implementation? More plugins, more potential conflicts, more maintenance burden.

The plugin ecosystem that's often cited as WordPress's strength becomes its weakness for specialised sites. You're building on top of a general-purpose foundation using components that weren't designed to work together, maintained by different developers with different priorities and update schedules.

Craft CMS takes a fundamentally different approach. It's a content-first platform where you define exactly what types of content you have and how they relate to each other. For a production company, this might mean:

• A "Projects" section with custom fields for director, client, industry, format, duration
• A "Directors" section that automatically pulls in all projects they've worked on
• A "Capabilities" section that shows what services you offer, linked to relevant projects
• A flexible relationship system that lets you connect these in whatever ways make sense

The result is a site where the content structure matches your actual business needs, not a blogging platform you're trying to force into a different shape. You can create sophisticated filtering and organisation without plugins, because that flexibility is built into the core system.

From a development perspective, Craft's templating system (using Twig) is dramatically cleaner and more powerful than WordPress's PHP-based templates. This means custom functionality—like those hover-preview video loops or custom players—is easier to implement and maintain. It also means the site performs better, because you're not loading a heavy plugin stack on every page load.

Let's talk specifically about video, since it's the core content for production companies. Standard embedded players from Vimeo or YouTube offer convenience, but they're built for general video sharing, not professional presentation.

Custom video implementation gives you control over:

The interface and branding. You decide what controls appear, how they're styled, whether there's a progress bar, whether there are quality options. The player looks like part of your site, not a widget from another platform.

Loading and performance. You can implement intelligent preloading, lazy loading for projects below the fold, and adaptive quality based on connection speed. This is particularly important for production sites that might have dozens of video-heavy project pages.

The viewing experience. Want a project to start with a 10-second preview loop before the user decides to watch the full piece? Want to show multiple angles or cuts of the same project in a custom interface? Want to create a seamless transition between projects in a reel? All of this requires control over video playback that third-party embeds don't offer.

We worked with design studio Modern Activity on The Post Arm's website build, implementing the technical infrastructure for their design. The custom video player wasn't just about aesthetics—it was about creating an experience that matched the precision of their post-production work. The interface needed to be as carefully considered as the content it was presenting.

A properly built production company website is not a small undertaking. It requires genuine development work, thoughtful design that supports the content, and a platform that can handle complex requirements without becoming a maintenance nightmare.

This is a different proposition from a £2,000 WordPress template customisation. But the return calculation is straightforward: if your company's day rates are in the thousands and projects run to tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, your website is directly involved in winning or losing significant business.

A site that makes it easy for creative agencies and brands to find relevant work, that presents your projects with the same care they were produced with, and that communicates your capabilities clearly—that site pays for itself many times over if it helps close even one additional project per year.

Conversely, a site that frustrates potential clients, that makes your work look generic, or that fails to communicate what makes you distinct from every other production company—that site is a liability no matter how inexpensive it was to build.

We worked with Modern Activity on the Park Village site, handling the technical build for their design. The challenge was representing a company with world-renowned directors, 10,000 square feet of studio space, and an extensive offering that includes both production and venue hire. The site needed to work for multiple audiences: agencies looking for directorial talent, brands seeking production partners, and event organisers interested in the space.

The solution wasn't to cram everything onto a homepage. It was to create a clear structural logic where each type of content had its proper place and the relationships between different offerings were intuitive. The design reinforced the premium positioning while the technical implementation ensured that video content—the core of the business—loaded quickly and looked exceptional.

This is what "more than just a showreel site" means in practice: a digital presence that matches the quality of the work it showcases, that makes that work easy to discover and understand, and that positions the company clearly in a competitive market.

If your production company's website feels like it's just going through the motions—showing work without really presenting it, organising projects without making them discoverable, or forcing your content into a platform that wasn't designed for what you do—it's worth considering what a properly built site could accomplish.

The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in a professional web build. It's whether you can afford to keep losing potential business to a site that doesn't do your work justice.

Your showreel is the starting point, not the finished article. The companies that understand this difference are the ones whose websites actually work as business tools, not just digital brochures.