A Vision Built for Paper
The site is still live today, updated regularly, and scores 90+ across every Lighthouse desktop metric — two decades after launch, in an era of frameworks and build tools that didn't exist when it was built.
A website is the opposite of print — it has to work everywhere, for everyone, indefinitely. Designing for that constraint turned out to matter more, twenty years on, than any specific technology we used to meet it.
Custom static-site templating system · Componentized build pipeline · Interactive career timeline · Crossfading snippet-to-detail navigation · Cross-browser design for an early-CSS era
A Vision Built for Paper
The site is still live today, updated regularly, and scores 90+ across every Lighthouse desktop metric — two decades after launch, in an era of frameworks and build tools that didn't exist when it was built.
A website is the opposite of print — it has to work everywhere, for everyone, indefinitely. Designing for that constraint turned out to matter more, twenty years on, than any specific technology we used to meet it.
Custom static-site templating system · Componentized build pipeline · Interactive career timeline · Crossfading snippet-to-detail navigation · Cross-browser design for an early-CSS era
My contacts on this project didn't need help finding a vision — they already had one. Both were artists before anything else: one an architect with real technical depth, one from the firm's marketing side, both fluent in the language of print. They'd already imagined the site the way you'd imagine a printed page: fixed, composed, complete within its frame — no scrolling, ever. My job wasn't to help them decide what they wanted. It was to find out whether the web, in a much earlier and far less capable era of CSS, could actually deliver it — across a dozen browsers that each interpreted it differently.
The firm wasn't just a landscape architecture practice — they were pioneers in LEED design, water-wise planting, designing for fire-prone areas, and using native, non-invasive plants that supported pollinators like bees. All of that expertise needed a home on the site, but nearly every section carried the same underlying tension: content that had to be scannable at a glance and rewarding on a closer look. The founder's own history was one case of this — extensive enough that a standard bio page would have buried it, so I built an interactive timeline instead. Awards, testimonials, and associations posed a related but distinct problem: visitors needed a sense of just how much was there, and a taste of each item, without losing the depth behind any single one. The solution was a list of snippets with key words highlighted, paired with a detail pane that crossfaded between items — working identically whether a visitor was actively clicking through or just letting it play on its own.
CMS options existed at the time, but none gave the level of design control this project needed — so we built the site in static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To keep shared pieces like the header and footer from being duplicated across dozens of hand-built pages, I wrote my own templating and build system in a .NET console application — years before Node.js made that kind of tooling common — that assembled the full site from its component pieces.
That system is still running the site today. It gets updated with new content every year, and scores 90+ across every Lighthouse metric — a site built in the CSS Wild West still outperforming plenty of sites built with modern frameworks.