A Complete Revamp

I am not a coder. I’m someone who thinks deeply of photo composition. So when I decided to finally setup a photography website, I default to Squarespace. Their ads were pervasive at the time. Every podcast I listened to, every show I watched, there Squarespace was trying to convince me that using their templates was the way to get a website up quickly and easily, especially a non-coder as me.

So I took the dive and and flipped through their 7.0 version templates. At the time in 2013, their pages were slick: images loading in eye-catching ways, navigation looked smooth, all to keep the visitor engaged and enthralled. They had me hooked and I jumped in.

I eventually landed on a style that worked, simple enough to load photos and enter text summaries, with eye-popping style. While eye-catching in a vacuum, do a quick search of amateur photographer websites and I start to notice how similar our pages looked.

But I wasn’t a coder, so I settled with what I had.

With the templates, the structure with which how to show and caption the photos was too rigid and I just settled. But even the rigidity had some issues. In the template, I wanted to include dates as a subtitle, but the template was buggy where I was able to include it in one of the collections. Though when I followed the same process for the next collection, nothing happened.

I was not invested enough (despite the actual financial investment) in getting this to work properly. So I resolved myself to not fixing that little thing. But then that little thing became a more little things, compromising the overall design of the site, and stifling any chance to think differently on how my portfolio could look like.

So for weeks, months, and years, my site just sat there as is.

And then recently, I was listening to the Hardfork podcast (tech focused podcast) and they were talking about how they vibe coded using Claude Code to create websites with just chatting with the Claude AI tool. I’ll let them explain their process in the links below, and skip to my results.

Start of the clip:

Examples of their pages:

Using their tips, I leveraged Claude Code over a weekend and was able to create a photography website that is more interesting and experimental (at least for someone who existed on a templated site).

First off there’s the splash page highlight one of a select few of photos which then fades to be the background photo.

Second, I set up the adventure collections and was able to have the images cycle with mouse hover overs.

Along with linking to my external sources: this Substack and my Instagram account, I created a moment’s page, inspired by a New York Times article about taking a long moment to take in art.

All of this, including a dark/light mode button, proper resizing on mobile devices, and create a cool wallpaper page easter egg was done over a few hours on a weekend with minor edits here and there as ideas came up.

So now I have a website I directed an AI agent to create whole cloth that I am very proud of.

So poke around and let me know what you think.