Wix Studio Case Study: Turning a Yearly Research Survey into a Live, Bilingual Data Platform
Updated: Sep 23
Client: Media Brand Trust Monitor
University research platform, English & German
2025 build and 2026 update on Wix Studio
Most research websites get built once and then slowly go out of date. The Media Brand Trust Monitor measures how much Germans trust around 100 media brands, and it isn't a one-off. The survey runs in waves. So its website has a harder job than most: tell a new story every year without being rebuilt every year.
We built the platform on Wix Studio in 2025. In summer 2026 the second survey wave arrived with a hard deadline: live in early September, in time for a conference. Our job was to turn a one-year ranking into a proper tracking study. Here's how we did both, on time, on budget and to the brief.
At a glance:
Client: Media Brand Trust Monitor (MBTM), a research project funded by the NORDAKADEMIE Foundation and Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, led by Prof. Dr. Michael Fretschner
Platform: Wix Studio, Wix CMS, Velo and Wix Multilingual
Scale: 100 brands per survey wave, 10 trust dimensions, 122 brand pages, two languages
2025: the full platform built and launched in about two months
2026: the new wave live before the September launch, for the fixed price agreed up front
This isn't a video. It's the live code from the MBTM home page, running inside this post. Five real brands measured in both waves: 2026 in coral, with 2025 ghosted behind it.
Part one, 2025: from spreadsheets to a data platform
MBTM scores each brand on ten dimensions of trust, from transparency and integrity to competence and halo, and rolls them into a single MBT score out of 100. In 2025 all of that lived in spreadsheets. The site had to present every number, in English and German, and still feel like a premium product rather than a database dump.
What we built on Wix Studio:
Two linked CMS collections, one for brands and one for categories, so every brand knows its category and every category lists its brands
Dynamic page templates, so over 100 brand pages and every category page come from one design each
Velo code for search, category filters and fast, controlled database queries
Wix Multilingual for a complete German version, data and charts included
A design system that keeps hundreds of generated pages looking hand-made
The 2025 launch, in English and German.
One decision from that first build came back later. Each brand's spider chart was an exported image, designed once and uploaded to the CMS. They looked great. But an image can't be updated, can't be compared with anything and can't be translated. Fine for one survey. The client had already told us there would be more.
2025 brand pages: live data from the CMS, with the chart as a static image.
Part two, 2026: a second wave and a hard deadline
In July 2026 the new data landed: a fresh survey of 1,000 nationally representative Germans rating 100 brands. 71 brands carried over from 2025, 29 were new (including a brand-new Podcast category) and 22 had dropped out. 28 of the carry-over brands had changed their names too. And the site had to go live in early September, timed to a conference.
The brief, in plain terms:
Publish the 2026 wave the same way as 2025
Keep 2025 available, don't replace it
For brands in both years, show the change: two lines on the spider chart, plus the movement in score
Update the team, contact and publications copy, mostly in German
We priced two routes: a straight data refresh, or an upgrade that rebuilt the charts and the data model properly. The client chose the upgrade and we agreed a fixed price before we started. The thinking was simple. This is a research programme, not a one-off project. Build the structure right once and every future wave gets cheaper and faster to publish.
How we built it: the Wix features doing the heavy lifting
1. A CMS designed for next year, not just this year
Instead of bolting the 2026 numbers onto the 2025 table, we added a new Wix CMS collection with one row per brand, per survey wave. 2026 went in as 100 rows. 2027 will be another 100 rows, with no redesign and no new pages. Categories got a matching set of 2026 fields, so both years sit side by side on the same record.
We also gave every brand a stored join key. That sounds dull, but it fixed a real problem. 28 renamed brands (Chip became CHIP.de, Radio Bob became Radio BOB!) had quietly lost the link to their 2026 scores. With the key in place, the client can rename a brand in the CMS whenever they like without breaking anything.
2. Charts drawn from the data, not exported
The static chart images are gone. Every brand and category page now has an HTML embed running Chart.js, fed by Velo straight from the CMS. The page hands the chart both years' scores, and the chart draws 2025 in grey, 2026 in coral, or both on top of each other so you can see exactly where trust moved.
Same brand, same ten dimensions. Left: the 2025 exported image. Right: the 2026 chart, drawn live from the CMS.
One file now serves every brand and every category, in both languages. When the data changes, the charts change with it. Nobody has to export a new set of chart images ever again.
Try it yourself. This is the same chart component that runs on every MBTM brand page, loaded with real scores:
3. One switch that moves the whole page
Every ranking and detail page got a 2025/2026 switch, written in Velo. Flip it and the scores, the ranks, the order of the list, the category filter, the related-brands carousel and the chart all move together. The site opens on 2026. Brands that are new in 2026 hide the switch, and brands that dropped out stay on 2025, so nobody lands on an empty page.
Same page, same URL. Left: the 2025 ranking. Right: 2026, where two podcasts now share first place.
Getting a Wix dataset to re-sort from code has a catch: it can only sort on a stored field. So we stored each brand's 2026 rank in the CMS instead of working it out in the browser. That one call made the list re-order instantly and took a slow data lookup out of every page view.
A brand page with both waves overlaid. The chart buttons and the page switch stay in sync.
4. German first, done properly
The German site gets far more visitors than the English one, so German couldn't be an afterthought. We used Wix Multilingual's translation layer, through Wix's APIs, to publish German content directly: the 2026 brand descriptions in both languages, German descriptions for the 2025 view that we wrote for all 93 original brands, category labels, the navigation, and the updated team and contact copy.
We didn't guess the house style either. We measured it from the client's own live copy, right down to using “Rang” rather than “Platz” for rank, and wrote to that.
The same page in German: labels, copy, categories and chart all translated.
5. Staged on the live site, invisible until launch
The whole 2026 dataset went into the live CMS weeks before launch without the public seeing any of it. New brands sat as CMS drafts. The client reviewed everything on the Wix Studio test site, using a sign-off dashboard we built for them: 150 checkable items, each linked to the page that proves it. That turned “have a look around” into a checklist they could work through brand by brand.
It's the same thinking we use when we redesign a Wix site without downtime. The live site never wobbled while a whole new dataset was being staged inside it.
6. Checking every page, not a sample
Before launch we checked all 122 brand pages against the database: 13 values per page, in both years. 122 out of 122 matched. Getting there caught problems nobody had reported. Invisible spaces at the end of brand names were leaving 54 charts empty. The German site was showing an English menu. And the category filter was listing some categories twice.
For the heavy data checking and reconciliation we used AI assistance working through Wix's own APIs, with every change read back and verified. It's a big part of how a small team held a fixed deadline without cutting corners on accuracy.
The 2026 category ranking: eleven categories, with the new Podcast category in joint fourth.
The toolkit
Wix Studio: responsive design, dynamic pages and the test site for client review
Wix CMS: brand, category and score-by-wave collections, drafts and stored join keys
Velo by Wix: year switches, sorting and filtering, brand-to-brand navigation and a backend preview of draft content
Wix Multilingual: German-first content through the translation layer
Wix Data and Translation APIs: loading, updating and checking data in bulk
Chart.js: the comparison charts, inside HTML embeds that talk to the page
Custom canvas animation: the morphing radar in the home page hero
Canva: the original logo template, matched for 29 new brand logos
AI-assisted QA: data reconciliation and page-by-page checks
The result
Live before the September launch, for the fixed price agreed in July
The brief delivered: the 2026 wave published, 2025 kept, two-line comparison charts and updated copy
100 brands, 11 categories and 122 brand pages, all showing the right data in both years and both languages
A client sign-off process with 150 checkable items instead of an email thread
A written runbook, so next year's wave is a data job: add the rows, update a few year labels, publish
The data got more interesting too. Radio BOB! shared the top spot in 2025. In 2026 two podcasts share first place, and Netflix dropped from 3rd to 58th. A one-off ranking can't tell those stories. A tracking study can, and now the website shows them.
Why this matters if you publish research
If you run a survey, an index or a ranking every year, your website shouldn't need rebuilding every year. Put the data in a proper structure once and each new wave becomes an update, not a project. Wix Studio can do that: bilingual, with interactive charts, and without needing a developer every time you publish.
It's the difference between a finished website and a working website. We don't build pages. We build systems that still work next year.
Running a study every year? Let's make publishing it the easy part. Book a free 20-minute call below.
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