Brand development for new ventures and growing businesses, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Role: Development, technical strategy, custom CMS (SanityPress)
Partner: Jeffrey Baker, JTB Imaginative (brand strategy and design)
Stack: Astro, Sanity, Netlify
What Jeffrey Needed
Jeffrey Baker runs JTB Imaginative on his own, handling strategy and creative direction and building a team around each project. His clients range from Himed in advanced ceramics to Frame Bio in pre-clinical biotech and HIPICO Santa Fe.
Until this project, he had no website. For a brand developer, that's a real gap: his pitch is visual judgment and range, and there was nowhere to see either. Three things had to be true:
- The portfolio had to hold very different work, from a logo mark to a full brand rollout, without forcing every project into one template.
- It had to stay quick while being almost entirely large imagery, because a slow portfolio undercuts the argument it exists to make.
- Jeffrey had to run all of it himself. Anything that needed a developer to publish would happen late or not at all.
The Architecture
Astro, for an image-heavy site. Almost no JavaScript ships to the browser, and every portfolio image comes from Sanity's image CDN, resized to the size it's shown at and converted to a modern format.
A Studio arranged around Jeffrey's day. Pages are built from a kit of layout blocks, so each project gets the arrangement that suits it. The Studio menu starts with Notifications for new inquiries, then the things he edits most: site settings, the homepage and projects.
Video through Mux. Jeffrey uploads video like any other media, and Mux streams it at the right quality for each viewer's connection.
Inquiries that don't get lost. Contact submissions are saved in Sanity with a status (new, reviewed, archived or spam), so leads and content live in one place, with no separate CRM.
SanityPress. This is SanityPress, my CMS setup on Sanity: the things a client updates most come first, and pages are built from flexible blocks. For Jeffrey, that meant a Studio for one person who publishes his own work.
How It Turned Out
Jeffrey publishes new projects himself, without contacting me. That was the goal, and it's the result I'd put first.
After a performance pass, the homepage scores 100 for performance, 98 for accessibility, and 100 for best practices and SEO in Lighthouse on desktop. On a phone, the first load dropped from 6.6 MB of images to about 1 MB.
The partnership kept going after launch. I also built the site for Frame Bio, Jeffrey's 90-day brand launch for a pre-clinical biotech startup.
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