Rafael was looking for a simple way to manage his design portfolio, upload case studies and share his thoughts without having to get his hands dirty with code.

Although he was familiar with the basics of WordPress, he knew he could save a lot of time by using some help, so he reached out to me to handle the technical aspects while he was focused on the content. We tackled the design equally, going for a simple layout that would put the focus on the work.

As for the builder, we decided to use the Semplice theme, as it was specifically targeted for UX designers and offered many interesting features. It’s certainly a comprehensive and intuitive tool, but it had some minor faults that made the experience more complex than I initially thought.

One example of that was the responsive features, which I found quite dissapointing. I ended up finding a workaround through CSS and media queries.

Let’s take for instance the picture below. Once build the standard header, we had to ensure a consistent view of the header regardless of the screen size. For that purpose, I created a class that set a fixed width to the image and made sure that it was always tied to the bottom, to simulate that cut-off effect.

The bulk of the work took place between March and May 2020. As we were reaching the end of our partnership, we did a tour around the backend, Google Analytics, Search Console, the server… so that he would be able to manage all by himself.