Planning first: how we built a website in a single day

Not long ago, the whole Zeroseven team spent a single day building a new website for The Tukka Project, a Brisbane charity making sure no kid goes hungry at school. My colleague Rebecca has written about the day itself. I want to talk about the thing that made it work, because it's the same thing that makes any project work, hack day or not.

You can build a website in a day. I've now watched it happen twice, the first time being our 2020 build for the Brisbane Zero campaign. But "in a day" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence, and it's worth being honest about what it hides.

The day is the easy part

Here's the uncomfortable truth about a one-day build: the day is the easy part. The hard part is everything that has to be settled before anyone sits down to write code.

Before our hack day, we'd already done discovery and design with The Tukka Project. We understood who the site was for, what it needed to do, how the donation journey should feel, and what their supporters needed to get out of it. We'd designed the pages. We'd agreed the structure. By the time the team walked in on the Friday, there were no open questions about what we were building. There was only the building.

That's the whole trick. A team can move astonishingly fast when nobody is debating the brief at 2pm. Pull that planning out, and a hack day becomes a very expensive argument with snacks.

This is the part I'd want any organisation to take from it, whether you're giving a charity a day of your time or commissioning a six-figure platform. The speed of a build is set by the quality of the thinking that came before it. Get the discovery and design right, and the build is almost calm.

Where Umbraco earns its place

Once the planning is done, you need tools that let a room full of people build in parallel without tripping over each other. That's where Umbraco comes in.

Umbraco is the open-source .NET CMS we've built on for years. Two things make it suit a day like this. We can stand up page templates and content widgets quickly, so the structure of the site exists early. And editors can start adding real content almost straight away, working alongside the developers while the site takes shape around them. Our content people sat with the Tukka team shaping copy at the same time as the developers built the pages it would live in. Nobody waited on anyone.

Umbraco also supported the day directly by provisioning the environments we worked in. [CONFIRM exactly what Umbraco provided before publishing.]

What we actually built

Three things, each tied to something The Tukka Project needs in order to keep doing its work.

• A CMS the team can run themselves. Templates and widgets that let them update and grow the site without a developer on call. A charity shouldn't have to ring an agency every time it wants to change a sentence.
• A donation flow built to convert. The clearer and simpler giving is, the more of it happens. This was the piece we most wanted to get right, because more donations means more lunches in more schools.
• A supporter portal. A logged-in area where partners and supporters can download what they need: protocol documents, process guides, school safety information and more.

[VISUAL: screenshot of the new site, the donation flow, or the CMS editing view]

Why this matters beyond a hack day

I've spent a lot of years working with Umbraco, and I was recently honoured to be named an Umbraco MVP for 2026. Around the same time, our work on Umbraco Cloud was recognised with the 2026 Umbraco Award for Best Cloud Solution. I mention both only because they point at the same idea. The platform is excellent, and we know it well. But the platform has never been the reason a project succeeds.

A hack day is a stunt. It's a good stunt, for a good cause, and I'd do it again tomorrow. It only works because of the unglamorous work that came first. That's as true of a website built in a day for a charity as it is of a platform built over two years for an enterprise. Plan first. Build second. The order is the whole point.