Arnaud CANIZARES is a painter and photographer, and the founder of AWA, the non-profit education-through-images project we had already worked on. His personal site, arnaudcanizares.com, carried his portfolio and his exhibitions. He asked for a refresh, not a rebuild: keep the site, make it presentable and fast.
The project in detail
The portfolio's structure was the heart of the work. A visitor looking for a work does not think in blog categories, they think in styles. The Portfolio menu therefore got a submenu per style, painting, photography, and under each a second level leading straight to a named work. Reaching a specific piece takes two clicks from any page, and the portfolio shows in three columns so the eye scans rather than scrolls.
Three slides opened the site, and each led somewhere: a close-up of a painting to the painting section, a photograph to the photography section, and an image of the artist at work to his biography. An artist's home page that leads nowhere is a poster; this one is an entrance.
The site moved to four languages, French, English, Italian and Portuguese, with the translations remaining the artist's responsibility. Captions were added to the works, which matters as much for the visitor as for search: an image with no text cannot be found.
The least visible part weighed the most. Studying his hosting, I found that his provider was billing him an extended support fee for an obsolete language version, meaning he was paying a premium to stay behind. We updated the site so it no longer needed that version, then migrated it onto our infrastructure, clearing out unused themes and plugins along the way, for less attack surface and less weight to load.
This page has no screenshot. The site was brought back up locally from its original code and database, but its commercial theme, a Ronneby paired with a child theme carrying his name, does not find its stylesheets again and the page renders with no formatting at all. Showing that would say nothing about the site that was delivered, so I would rather describe it and stick to verifiable facts.