This Site by Adam

The brief

A portfolio site for a web designer and photographer has one job above all others: it has to be good. Actually good, because the site itself is the pitch.

WordPress would have been the obvious choice. It's the platform used for most client work. But building a personal portfolio in WordPress and Elementor would have been self-undermining. It would say: I know how to use a template builder. That is not the message.

The brief was to build something that demonstrates genuine technical depth. A site that earns its credibility rather than claiming it.

The approach

No content management system. No framework. No build tools, no bundler, no dependencies beyond GSAP for animation. Just HTML, CSS and JavaScript: written by hand, structured with care, and served as static files directly to the browser.

A unified CSS architecture handles the full design system: fluid typography using clamp(), a CSS custom property colour system with per-page accent colours, a dual light and dark theme stored in localStorage, and a mobile-first responsive layout that adapts cleanly at every breakpoint.

The JavaScript is lean and purposeful: page transitions, scroll-triggered reveals, a custom cursor with damped following, and a hero word cycle that brings the homepage to life without ever becoming an obstacle to the content.

Performance

Without a CMS, there is nothing to slow the site down. No PHP executing on every request. No database query assembling the page. No plugin stack adding weight. The HTML is ready the moment it's requested.

Images are sized appropriately. Scripts are deferred. Animations respect prefers-reduced-motion. The custom cursor doesn't load on touch devices. A fast site signals care and competence before a single word is read.

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization

Search is changing. Traditional SEO remains important, but AI-powered tools including Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot are increasingly the first point of contact between a question and an answer.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of building and structuring content so these AI systems can find, understand and cite it accurately. A hand-coded site has a significant natural advantage: AI language models read clean, semantic HTML, parse structured data directly, and favour pages that load quickly. A WordPress site buried under plugin output and dynamically injected markup is harder for a generative engine to interpret. A clean HTML page is not.

This site was built with that in mind from the start:

• Every page carries full JSON-LD structured data (Person, Service, CreativeWork, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList), giving AI systems clear, unambiguous signals about what the page is, who it belongs to, and what it describes
• Semantic HTML throughout: proper heading hierarchy, landmark elements, descriptive labels and meaningful structure that a machine can follow as naturally as a human
• The FAQ page uses FAQPage schema with full question and answer pairs, making it directly citable by AI summaries and eligible for Google's rich result formats
• All content in the HTML source on first load, with nothing hidden behind JavaScript that a crawler might not wait for
• Canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata on every page, giving every entry point a clean, consistent identity

The outcome

The site is the proof. It loads fast, reads cleanly, works on every device, and holds up to scrutiny from both human visitors and machine crawlers.

WordPress remains the right answer for the majority of projects. But for a portfolio, a high-performance brochure, or any project where technical excellence, search visibility and AI discoverability are the priority, a bespoke hand-coded build is the better tool — see the full web design work for the range of approaches.

This site exists to show what that looks like.

If you think your project might benefit from the same approach, get in touch.