01
Custom theme, no page builder
Templates written directly against the content model. Page builders add weight and give an editor a hundred ways to break a layout that was designed to be restrained — the opposite of what this site needed.
← ALL WORK
CASE 03
4 weeks
Aris Thanasis Photography
Architectural photography portfolio for a Cyprus-based studio.
- WordPress
- Custom theme
- Sector
- Architectural photography
- Client
- Independent studio, Cyprus
- Content
- Image-first project portfolios
- Engagement
- Fixed scope, 4 weeks
- CMS
- WordPress, custom theme
Architectural photography sells on image quality, and the web punishes exactly that. We built a custom WordPress theme where enormous photographs load fast on a phone over Cypriot mobile data, the layout gets out of the work's way, and the photographer can publish a new project without asking anyone for help.
THE PROBLEM
What was going wrong.
The work is the pitch. A portfolio that degrades the photographs, or takes eight seconds to show them, actively costs the studio commissions.
Off-the-shelf photography themes optimise for the theme. Sliders, overlays, animated captions and a colour accent on everything — all of it competing with images that were the entire reason a visitor arrived.
Architectural photography is unusually demanding on delivery: wide compositions, fine detail in shadow, and clients who will pinch-zoom to inspect a facade on a phone. Aggressive compression that flatters a stock photo destroys this work.
Publishing had to be self-service. A portfolio that requires a developer to add a project stops being updated within a year, and an out-of-date portfolio is a liability for a working photographer.
CONSTRAINTS WE WORKED UNDER
- ·Image fidelity is non-negotiable, and page weight is the enemy. Both are true simultaneously.
- ·A large share of visitors arrive on mobile over variable connections.
- ·Content editing has to be genuinely simple — the photographer publishes, not a developer.
- ·The site has to hold up in search for local architectural photography enquiries.
WHAT WE DID
The short version.
- 01
Built a custom theme from scratch rather than fighting a commercial one — no sliders, no overlays, nothing competing with the photographs.
- 02
Engineered the image pipeline properly: responsive srcsets, modern formats with fallbacks, dimension-aware lazy loading and no layout shift.
- 03
Modelled projects as structured content — project, location, brief, image set — so publishing is filling in a form rather than laying out a page.
- 04
Handled the technical SEO groundwork: structured data, clean semantics, sitemap, and metadata the photographer controls per project.
ARCHITECTURE
How it's built.
02
Image delivery pipeline
Multiple derivatives per upload in modern formats with fallbacks, responsive srcsets sized to real breakpoints, explicit dimensions to eliminate layout shift, and lazy loading below the fold with eager loading for the hero.
03
Structured project content
Projects carry location, brief, year, discipline and an ordered image set as real fields. The template renders them; the editor never touches layout, which is what keeps the design intact over years of publishing.
04
Restrained presentation layer
Typography, generous whitespace and full-bleed imagery. No carousels, no parallax, no entrance animations on photographs that already do the work.
05
Technical SEO
Semantic markup, per-project metadata under the photographer's control, structured data for the studio and its projects, clean URLs and a generated sitemap.
KEY DECISIONS
What we chose, and what it cost.
Custom theme instead of a commercial photography theme
WHY
Every commercial theme evaluated shipped features that had to be disabled and weight that could not be. Starting from nothing was faster than subtracting.
TRADE-OFF
No vendor updates and no feature marketplace. In exchange, the page contains exactly what it needs and nothing else.
Quality-biased compression rather than maximum compression
WHY
The images are the product. A page that scores perfectly while making a facade look mushy has optimised the wrong number.
TRADE-OFF
Larger payloads than an aggressive preset would produce, offset by format selection, correct sizing and loading strategy rather than by degrading the work.
Structured fields over free-form page editing
WHY
Constraining the editor is what keeps a designed site looking designed after two years of updates.
TRADE-OFF
Less layout flexibility per project. The photographer wanted to publish photographs, not design pages.
THE HARD PARTS
What nearly broke it.
Wide images on narrow screens
Architectural compositions are frequently panoramic, and a full-width panorama on a phone becomes a thin strip. Art-directed sources per breakpoint — different crops, not just different sizes — kept the composition readable on mobile.
Fidelity versus weight
Finding the compression point where architectural detail survives took visual comparison at real viewing sizes rather than trusting a default quality setting. The settled parameters are documented so future uploads stay consistent.
Ordering large image sets
The default media interface made sequencing a thirty-image project tedious enough to discourage publishing. A drag-ordered image set on the project screen removed the friction that would otherwise have let the site go stale.
HOW IT RAN
The timeline.
01
Content model & design direction
Week 1Defined how a project is structured and agreed a presentation language that stays out of the photographs' way.
02
Theme build
Week 2Templates, typography, layout system and the project and index views.
03
Image pipeline & performance
Week 3Derivative generation, responsive sources, art-directed crops, loading strategy and layout-shift elimination.
04
SEO, editor experience, launch
Week 4Structured data, metadata controls, the drag-ordered image set, then launch and a publishing walkthrough.
OUTCOME
What changed.
0
Cumulative layout shift on project pages
Art-directed
Crops per breakpoint, not just resized images
Self-serve
Photographer publishes projects unaided
No builder
Custom theme, no page-builder weight
A portfolio that loads fast, presents the work at full quality, and gets updated — because publishing takes minutes and needs nobody's help.
The restraint is the design. Removing every element that competed with the photographs made the work look more expensive, which for a commissioned photographer is the entire commercial point.
Self-service publishing is what keeps it alive. The portfolio reflects current work because adding a project is a ten-minute job, not a support request.
STACK
What it's made of.
PLATFORM
- WordPress
- Custom theme
- PHP
MEDIA
- Responsive srcsets
- Modern formats + fallbacks
- Art-directed crops
- Lazy loading
FRONTEND
- Semantic HTML
- Typography system
- No page builder
SEO
- Structured data
- Per-project metadata
- Sitemap
- Clean URLs
HANDOVER
What they kept.
- ✓Publishing guide written for the photographer: adding a project, ordering an image set, setting metadata.
- ✓Documented image export settings so uploads stay consistent with the tuned pipeline.
- ✓Theme documentation and backup procedure for whoever maintains the site next.