The Business
A channel that outgrew its own website.
Nuffinbutfishing started as a YouTube channel. It became a business — videos, tuition, digital products and brand sponsorships, all built on Joe Wooltorton’s voice and a following that genuinely turns up.
The business was thriving. The website hadn’t kept up with it.
The Problem
Everything, everywhere — but nowhere.
There was no single place that held it all together. A link to a video here, a booking link there, a discount code somewhere else. The full picture of what Nuffinbutfishing offers never landed in one place — so the audience only ever saw fragments, and every new opportunity meant another orphaned link.
Joe didn’t need a landing page. He needed a hub: one home that feels unmistakably like the brand, organises everything the business does, and is built to grow with it — not something to rebuild in twelve months when the next opportunity lands.
The Audience
Anglers arrive on a phone, mid-scroll.
Joe’s audience doesn’t find him through Google. They come from a video description, a story link, a comment under something they just watched — which means they land on a phone, one-handed, halfway through something else, and usually after one specific thing: the video they just heard about, the tuition day they want to book, or the discount code for a bit of kit.
That shaped the build more than any brand decision did. The latest videos surface automatically, so the thing most people came for is never more than a scroll away. Tuition explains itself and hands off to booking without a detour. Sponsor codes live somewhere findable instead of buried in a description box. Every layout decision was made phone-first and checked on desktop afterwards — because that’s the order the audience actually uses it in.
None of this came from a formal study, and it didn’t need to. It’s what you do when you already know where an audience comes from and what they turned up for — and it’s the difference between a site that looks good in a screenshot and one that works for the people using it.
The Approach
Architecture first. Design second.
Most creator sites are built for now and fall apart when the business grows. This wasn’t a landing-page brief — it was a platform brief. So we worked in that order.
Before a single screen was designed, we mapped the architecture: the sitemap, the content model, and how every piece fits — with an explicit eye on where the business is heading. E-commerce and deeper booking integration aren’t built in phase one, but both are accounted for in how phase one is built. When those become the priority, they’ll be an addition — not a restart.
Only once the foundation was right did we move to design: a full UI across desktop and mobile, drawn from a web brand guide built on Nuffinbutfishing’s existing green and typography, with reusable components so new pages stay consistent as the site grows.
What I Built
One home for everything.
A content hub, on a modern stack. Designed and built from scratch in Next.js — fast, semantic, and SEO-ready from day one. No page builder, no template, no ceiling.
Content Joe controls. A Sanity CMS wired so Joe manages it all himself — posts, pages, sponsorships, discount codes — with no developer in the loop.
Always current. The latest videos surface automatically through the YouTube API, so the site is never stale.
Every revenue stream given room. A tuitions section that sells the offer and hands off cleanly to Joe’s existing booking partner; a sponsorships & brands area managed through the CMS; an email signup synced to the existing list from day one; and a social hub that pulls every channel into one place.
Built to be found. Semantic HTML, metadata, Open Graph, a sitemap, and fast global delivery on Vercel.
A launch, not just a page. Ahead of phase one going live, the hub opened with a considered coming-soon page — a deliberate marketing asset, not a placeholder. It began as a clean "Summer 2026" holding page and evolved into a live countdown, giving Joe something concrete to rally his audience around and build anticipation through his social channels as launch approached. The launch was treated as part of the product, not an afterthought.
The Careful Bit
Move the front door without disturbing the house.
Nuffinbutfishing already runs digital products on a separate platform, managed by a third party — a live, revenue-generating part of the business that simply could not break. Bringing a new site live on the existing domain meant careful DNS and domain planning: launching the new hub while leaving those products exactly where they were, untouched and uninterrupted.
It’s the kind of work nobody notices when it’s done right — and everybody notices when it isn’t. A lot of the planning went here, and it was worth it.
Built in Phases
Ship the foundation. Add the rest when it’s time.
Phase one is the hub: the site, the brand guide, the CMS, the integrations, SEO, and support — everything needed to bring the whole business under one roof and start compounding.
Phases two and three — e-commerce and deeper booking — are deliberately not scoped yet. What the business needs in a year might look nothing like what we’d guess today. The whole point of getting the architecture right first is that whatever comes next sits on solid ground: an addition, never a rebuild.
The Result
A business with one front door.
Phase one delivered the hub: the site, the web brand guide, the CMS, the integrations, the SEO foundation, and the launch runway. Everything Nuffinbutfishing does now sits in one place, in one voice, on infrastructure Joe runs himself without a developer in the loop.
The rest of the vision — e-commerce and deeper booking — is already accounted for in the architecture. When the business is ready for each one, it’s an addition rather than a restart. That was the entire reason for building it in that order.
The brief we set out in the very first conversation was a hub that grows with the business rather than one it outgrows. That’s what shipped.
Phase one launch: September 2026.
In Joe’s Words
"A next step, not starting again."
Honestly, working with Sam has been brilliant. We’d built up so much with Nuffinbutfishing, but people were struggling to find everything we had to offer, and now it’s all in one place. Before he designed a thing, he wanted to know what we wanted to achieve with the website, not just where we are, and that’s made all the difference.
The site is beautiful, clean and smooth which is exactly what we wanted. Even now, after several weeks of being live, we keep spotting little additions that add to the experience. The attention to detail has really made it stand out.
The launch was so smooth too, and the coming soon page and countdown were such a nice touch. They really got everyone excited for it. Now we’re onto the shop, and because he built everything with the next step in mind, that’s exactly what it is: a next step, not starting again. It’s been a massive journey but it’s felt like a walk in the park and we genuinely couldn’t have done it without him.
— Joe Wooltorton, Nuffinbutfishing
Why This One Matters
I’m a keen angler myself — so building for the fishing world isn’t a niche picked off a spreadsheet, it’s one I’m genuinely part of. Working with Joe made that click: I understand this audience, these products, and this culture, and I want to do far more of exactly this.
Nuffinbutfishing is the start of a deliberate move into an industry I’m passionate about — and proof of what a fishing brand’s website can actually be. It’s why design and build for the fishing world is now a specialism of mine.