Polar Media is a production studio based in Perth and London that helps industrial and technology-driven businesses communicate complex ideas through film, animation, VR, AR, and real-time content in a way people can easily understand.
This project reimagined PolarMedia’s website as a portfolio-driven experience that truly reflects the scale and quality of their work. It brings clarity to complex content, unifies projects across both studios, and makes everyday updates simple for non-technical staff. Most importantly, it restores full ownership of their digital presence after they lost access to their previous website source code.
A portfolio-driven Umbraco 17 website that unifies Polar Media's Perth and London studios under one system, with full source-code ownership restored to the client and everyday content updates made simple for non-technical staff.
Buying back and fixing up the old source code would have meant piling on costs and risks. Starting fresh was the simpler, more affordable route.
The previous agency held onto the source code and wanted payment before handing it over. Even after buying it back, PolarMedia would still need an audit to check the code was secure and built to a decent standard, adding more time and expense.
The site was running on Umbraco 11, a version that had already reached end of life and wasn't receiving security patches anymore. Staying on it meant leaving PolarMedia open to ongoing security risks.
The old build was built around the uSkinned commercial theme and Umbraco Forms, both of which needed separate paid licences. These couldn't be transferred to a new owner and added ongoing costs that didn't really justify themselves for a site of this size.
The site's old layout, a mixed tile grid with videos boxed into small frames, felt out of step with the cinematic, full-width look of the studios PolarMedia looked up to. A redesign was already overdue, and the rebuild gave them the perfect opportunity to fix it.
Instead of trying to rescue a legacy codebase, we proposed starting fresh on Umbraco 17, the latest version of the CMS, with no third-party theme dependencies, licence costs, and full source code ownership handed to the client on delivery.
We spent time with the client through calls and written exchanges to map out the full scope, review the live site and how they actually used the back office, and recommend what to rebuild and what to leave behind. They shared a PDF design based on a site they admired, MrMr Films, and we focused on bringing their vision to life exactly as they'd pictured it, not layering our own ideas on top.
We built the new site on Umbraco 17 with .Net 10, hosted on Microsoft Azure App Service for its reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency over a self-managed VPS or Umbraco Cloud. Every page template, document type, and back-office feature was built around what the client had confirmed.
We turned the client's design into a pixel-perfect build: a full-width 16:9 hero video, a Vimeo hover-play portfolio grid with alternating tile layouts, Load More pagination, an animated About page headline, and team grids split by studio. Every visual call was theirs; ours was flawless execution.
We replaced Umbraco Forms with a custom-built contact form at zero licence cost, plus a private page builder for shareable, unlisted Vimeo-and-text pages, ideal for tailored client pitches. A scroll-triggered newsletter popup and page-by-page SEO controls rounded out the feature set.
We kept this list deliberately short. Every feature here is something the client actually asked for and uses daily.
A muted Vimeo showreel autoplays edge to edge on every screen, and swapping it out takes seconds from the back office.
Project tiles shift between wide and boxed as you scroll, each one playing a quiet preview the moment you hover.
Handy for pitching specific clients: build a page with text and video, then share the link quietly, off Google entirely.
Pops up once someone's scrolled a bit, grabs their email, and works fine with Mailchimp or Brevo if needed later.
From team photos to analytics IDs, the studio can update almost anything themselves, no developer, no waiting around.
A map sits beside a form we built from scratch, so there's no Umbraco Forms licence weighing things down.
Meta tags, sitemaps, canonical URLs, even page-level noindex settings, all sitting quietly in the back office, ready when needed.
Perth and London get their own team grids, each photo and title editable in-house, plus a spot for hiring calls.
Runs on Azure for the reliability and room to grow, and it's documented well enough for the client to manage solo.
Six weeks, five milestones, one client who signed off on every stage before the next began. The result: a site PolarMedia can finally call their own.
For the first time, PolarMedia holds their own source code outright, with no agency standing between them and their website.
The old theme and forms licences are gone. What replaced them was custom-built, so there's nothing left to keep paying for.
Nobody on the team needs a developer anymore. Content, videos, team pages, settings, it's all theirs to edit whenever they like.
The homepage milestone won enough trust that the client pushed for more, turning a partial rebuild into a full site redesign.
Built on Umbraco 17 and .NET 10 LTS, the platform isn't going anywhere near end-of-life for a good long while yet.
Sumedha Softech Pvt Ltd delivered a website that the client could fully update and manage in-house. The team demonstrated solid project management and was responsive and easy to deal with. Sumedha Softech Pvt Ltd's patience and ability to work closely with the client set them apart.
Tell us what you're building and we'll show you how we'd approach it — no licence lock-in, no vendor holding your code hostage.
Tell us what you're building and we'll show you how we'd approach it — with the work to back it up.
