Last week in the studio (CW31-26)

Last week I unexpectedly found myself with time to tackle the second phase of my Stuff & Nonsense website upgrade.

Last week I unexpectedly found myself with time to tackle the second phase of my Stuff & Nonsense website upgrade. A client asked to delay her project until September, which left me with an unexpected opportunity to rethink my portfolio, improve how pages connect, and rewrite much of the copy across my website.

There were two issues I wanted to tackle:

1. Make my portfolio more consistently structured.
2. Improve linking between pages.

Making my portfolio more structured

Previously, my portfolio was a set of blog-style pages, where I described what I did during a project. Every portfolio project now follows the same structure, explaining the client’s challenge, my thinking, the solution, the outcome, and what the project demonstrates. Each page also connects naturally to related services, blog posts, and other projects, making the portfolio much easier to explore. I wrote a content scheme:

• The challenge
• My approach
• The solution
• Behind the design
• The result (and what this project demonstrates)
• Related projects (portfolio)
• Related reading (blog entries and services)

My portfolio page for Lockrose shows how this scheme works for a recent project.

I also designed a new portfolio gallery which lets me present work much more like a design case study than a screenshot gallery. Each project can include sketches, concepts, branding work, illustrations, finished designs, animations, or videos, helping people understand how a project evolved instead of only showing the finished result.

Some people are interested in the outcome. Others enjoy understanding how the work came together. That’s why every portfolio project now has a companion article covering my process, inspiration, sketches, experiments, and ideas that never reached the finished design.

Here’s the post about my project for Lockrose.

Improving linking between pages

I’ve been incredibly lax about linking between business pages like my biography and what I do, blog pages, and portfolio projects. My portfolio projects now link to supporting posts in my blog, but the blog itself needed reorganising. I trimmed the number of categories, recategorised and retagged over 1000 posts, and deleted several hundred old “link posts” which mostly linked to dead URLs. Categories like animations, CSS, Eleventy, and SVG are now much more focused than before. Journal posts, like this one, now live in a new Studio updates category.

I also wrote a knowledge graph script which analyses every blog post, identifies important keywords and phrases, and ranks relationships between them. My blog templates now use that information to suggest genuinely related articles automatically, while I can still add links manually whenever I want to make a stronger connection.

I use websites to help organisations tell better stories.

When the Eleventy coding was finished, I spent a couple of days refocussing my copy, away from simply “I design websites” to what I really do, which is to use websites to tell stories about clients, what they do, and what they sell. There’s now a much stronger focus on storytelling using animations and illustrations as well as words. I fully suspect this will affect how AI and search view my site, and that I’ll need to come back to this over the coming months.

On holiday until mid-September

I’m now on holiday with Alex and Sue until mid-September. We’re traveling around southern Germany, far away from the studio. I plan on spending time concentrating on my photography while we’re away. So, don’t be surprised if, over the next six weeks, photographs of Bavarian castles, forests, villages, and mountain landscapes replace my usual thoughts about design, coding, and storytelling.