Guide: You Need A New Microsite Fast!

Your executive team drops a new campaign on you. "We need a microsite. Fast. And cheap."

You've been down this road before: rushed vendor quotes, compromise after compromise, and a site that's a pain to maintain or repurpose later.

There's a better way. AI can actually help here, not as magic, but as part of a practical tech stack that lets you (or your web developer) build excellent microsites quickly, affordably, and in a way you can actually maintain and evolve.

This guide will show you how.

In This Guide

In this guide, I'll show you a great tech stack, one that you and your web developers can use to build excellent microsites. These will be sites that you can repurpose later, easily maintain over time, and even merge into your other web properties.

We'll see how the AI code-generating tool v0 by Vercel can quickly create a Next.js front-end. Then we'll see how all of this can be wired up to a Strapi back-end for content management. We'll unpack all of these terms and have a look at what's so great (no, really!) about each of them.

What You Could Build

This stack works for multiple scenarios:

Campaign Landing Pages Time-sensitive product launches, event registrations with countdown timers, or lead magnets with gated content. You need something focused that does one job really well.

Microsites for Partnerships or Programs Co-branded partner portals, limited-time promotions, or program enrollment sites. These need to feel distinct from your main site but still professional.

Community or Event Sites Local group coordination, conference or meetup sites, member directories. These need simple content management and easy updates.

The example we'll walk through is for a local pickleball group, but the same approach powers any of these scenarios. Once you see how it works, you'll recognize where else you could use it.

Our Example

In this guide, we'll have a look at a microsite I built for a local parent group: Santa Cruz Pickleball Parents. This site, like every microsite, is targeted. It has one job: reliably get the people the information they need with minimal friction, then get them to convert.

ROI

There are two ROI's here. First, there's the return on your time investment. You'll walk away after reading this guide with good language to use with both your web developers and your executive team about one of the optimal AI web development stacks. And second, you'll have a better understanding of the ROI to be gained from one of these microsite builds.

The Stack: What Are The Components?

For hosting: Vercel

Vercel is a platform as a service provider (PaaS). It merges the ability to host JavaScript-based websites with CDN capabilities along with edge computing and deployment services. Your web developer connects Vercel to a code repository, and Vercel does the rest of the work of compiling, launching, and serving your code at scale across the globe.

For AI: v0

v0 is Vercel's AI code generation platform. It is optimized to create web applications within the JavaScript universe. That means it will create excellent Next.js or React web page components and fit them together into a coherent whole. It can generate back-end code as well to support CMS connections and other integrations. You can prompt v0 with text, upload designs, or connect it to a Figma account. From any of these sources it can generate website code.

For front-end code: Next.js

Next.js is an open-source project by the people at Vercel. Next.js is a variant of React with Node.js capabilities baked in. This means it can serve front-end pages and also act as a back-end API for all sorts of secure, performant website activities.

For content management: Strapi

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS built entirely in JavaScript. Developers can run it on their local machines and then deploy their work to Strapi Cloud or another hosting provider. Strapi has an extensive plugin architecture that makes the sky the limit for what you can customize. Strapi also has baked-in AI capabilities that allow you to generate content models from text prompting or uploading of website components.

For form management: Formspree

There are a ton of form management tools available. Formspree is one that our clients choose quite often when working in a headless context. Your web developer can point one or more web forms to Formspree, and it takes care of the rest.

Why This Stack vs. Alternatives

You might wonder: why not just use WordPress with a page builder? Or one of those "AI website generators"?

WordPress + Page Builder: Great for some projects, but overkill for a focused microsite. You're maintaining plugins, dealing with security updates, and paying for hosting that doesn't scale efficiently. For a simple microsite, it's bringing a semi-truck when you need a sports car.

AI Website Generators (Wix AI, etc.): Fast to start, but you're locked into their platform. Can't easily repurpose components later or merge into your main site when the campaign ends. And you're paying platform fees as long as the site exists.

This Stack: You own the code. Your developer can maintain it with standard web development practices. It scales automatically without you thinking about it. And most importantly, you can evolve it over time or integrate components into other properties. No vendor lock-in, no recurring platform fees beyond basic hosting.

Think of it this way: you're building an asset you own, not renting someone else's template.

How Does Everything Fit Together?

Let's look at the specific example of my Santa Cruz Pickleball Parents website.

I found out that some parents I knew had formed a group to play pickleball every Friday. If they could get a website together, they could draw in more players and also be taken seriously by the city parks department. This way they could reserve courts every week and avoid hassle.

I offered to build them a targeted microsite knowing that this stack I've been showing you can come together and be launched very quickly. I started with v0. Here was my exact prompt:

I am building a website for a local group here in Santa Cruz California. It's called Santa Cruz Pickleball Parents. I would like to build the website in Next.js, Strapi, Tailwind and Google Fonts. On the home page, in the hero area, I would like a countdown timer that counts down to the next pickleball game. Every game is at 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm PST on Fridays. The only other pages we need are About and Calendar. You can improvise the About page and I'll edit it. On the calendar page I would like a calendar that has each Friday marked for the 2-4 pm game time. I want to be able to alter specific days from the CMS by applying exceptions. For example, if there is a cancellation anticipated next month.

I wanted the AI to do my work for me. It was a microsite, built in a hurry, with one simple job. I didn't see why I should have to put in that much effort!

In less than a minute, v0 had produced the front-end Next.js components and fitted them into a complete website. It had coded the countdown timer for me for the home page. It had prepared the code to support the kind of ongoing exception based calendar I had described. It had added imagery. And one of my favorite things of all, it had improvised excellent initial content for all the pages. You know what a bear it can be to just get the first round of content into your web pages. This was a huge time saver.

The next thing I did was download the code from v0 so that I could examine it. I need to understand the websites that I am going to launch and support. I need to know what's going on under the hood.

I could have had v0 add the new project into my GitHub account. But I decided I would do that myself.

The next step, after verifying the Next.js front-end code and refactoring a couple of things to my liking, was to build out the Strapi content model. There's fierce competition in the headless CMS space. One of the ways that Strapi sticks out is by the ease through which complex content models can be generated.

Under the hood of a Strapi content type is a JavaScript schema. I can already see your eyes glazing over. But what matters is that the content types are represented by files in your Strapi installation. This means they are easily editable, by you as well as by an AI. This means you can have AI generate your content types for you. In fact, Strapi AI can consume Figma, front-end files or text prompts and create content types for you.

Once my Strapi instance was complete, with a page builder, calendar and other content types, I was ready to deploy it to Strapi Cloud. Guess how hard that was? I simply connected my GitHub repo to my Strapi Cloud account, and the next thing I knew, it was deployed! The back-end was up and running.

Since the AIs did the work for me, I merely needed to provide a Formspree URL to my Next.js code, and the contact form submissions would land in the right place, with spam protections and other safeguards already in place.

How Do You Launch It?

When it's time to launch a v0-generated website, you can do so right on the platform. You click a button, and the website is deployed into Vercel. All you have to do is assign a domain name.

In the real world, your web developer will want to review the code and refactor some things before launch. There are gotchas that humans can still see much better than AIs can.

Once you and your developer are satisfied that the generated site is ready, you'll tell Vercel to deploy the final product from your code repository, something like GitHub.

At the same time, you will make sure your Strapi site was deployed to Strapi Cloud so that your Next.js front-end could reach it in order to build content.

In fact, the most performant websites fetch their page content from Strapi while their pages are being built and deployed to Vercel. This is static page generation and it's the fastest, most scalable way to deploy such a site.

How Do You Maintain It?

Once your microsite is in maintenance mode, you really start seeing the value of the investment. A website built on this stack is highly maintainable. You can adapt it in many different ways over time. If you need more components for your page builder, they are easy to add in. You can even do so again with v0 to save time.

In fact, at the Next.js Conference in 2024, a lead engineer at PayPal was describing how they were gradually transitioning their code base over to Next.js. The reason was that what they needed to migrate was so complex and maintained by so many developers that the underlying platform itself had to be far more flexible and scalable, yet also clearly defined, which is where React and Next.js thrive.

Security, Scalability, Flexibility

Security

You may be asked, as you prepare to deploy your microsite, is this SOC2 Certified? SOC2 is a standard for verifying and certifying an organization and platform's system and organizational control. Basically, it's a security paradigm that includes 3rd party audit and certification bodies.

Vercel and Strapi Cloud are both SOC2 Type 2 certified. This is the standard you are looking for. And it's the standard that will make your IT team check a box and go away.

Scalability

A Platform as a Service, which is what both Vercel and Strapi Cloud are, takes away concerns about scale. They are both backed by extensive CDN networks and both employ distributed edge computing models. Since they are both running JavaScript, the starting point is itself highly scalable and performant.

Flexibility

When a web development stack is flexible, it means that it can be easily adapted over time. Flexibility in web development means you won't regret your platform choice years from now.

Another measure of flexibility has to do with how many ready-made packages of functionality have been created and contributed by other developers to the platform. As of this writing, NPM, the repository of JavaScript packages, contains more than 3.6 million contributions. That gives your web developer a great deal of flexibility. All they have to do to add more functionality to your website is run a command like this: npm i @solspace/strapi-plugin-imagiterate

What's The ROI?

Time Investment: A few hours of your web developer's time (or your own if you're hands-on). Not weeks of vendor coordination and back-and-forth revisions.

Cost: Hosting costs that scale with actual usage. For most microsites, you're looking at under $50/month. No enterprise licenses or platform fees eating into your marketing budget.

Speed to Market: Days, not weeks or months. When that executive team says "we need this fast," you can actually deliver fast.

Long-term Value: You own the code. Components can be repurposed for your next campaign. The site can evolve with your needs without rebuilding from scratch. When the campaign ends, you can archive it or integrate the best parts into your main site.

In my pickleball parents case, it's measured in happy parents blowing off steam on a Friday afternoon. In your case, it might be measured by how quickly you launched a campaign that would have taken your agency vendor 6 weeks and $15k to deliver, and you did it in a week for a fraction of the cost.

A few short hours for a result this good? That's an ROI anyone can get behind.

Ready to Build Your Microsite?

If you have a microsite project coming up and want to explore whether this stack makes sense for your specific needs, let's talk.

Schedule a 30-minute conversation where we'll dig into what you're trying to accomplish, discuss whether this approach is the right fit, talk through any technical questions or concerns, and point you in the right direction—even if that's not us.