A portfolio built for clarity, not clutter.

No website. No domain. No hosting.

Robert didn't have a website at all. No domain, no hosting — nothing. His goal was simple: let people know he's a journalist, video producer, and teacher. But his work was everywhere: LA Times articles, YouTube documentaries, LinkedIn posts, photos from years of field work.

The real mess wasn't the design — it was the logistics. He was busy and took forever to send images and videos. He didn't have a domain or hosting, so I had to teach him how to buy both and recommended a host. I was also still learning — my professor assigned Robert to me as a class project and told me to "use WordPress templates" but I didn't like them.

Researched like a journalist, built from scratch.

Before I contacted Robert, I Googled him. Found his LA Times work, his socials, his LinkedIn. Most of his bio was already online. I used that to build a test site on free hosting and emailed it to him to start the conversation.

When we talked, he didn't give me references — but I knew the vibe he wanted because he worked at LA Times. Newspaper style: white background, black text, Display + sans-serif, lots of whitespace. Minimal, not flashy. Credible.

• StructureOrganized by importance, not chronology: Home / Biography / Portfolio / Contact. No single long page — separate pages so editors could jump straight to what they need.
• DesignLA Times-inspired: white + black only, Instrument Serif for headlines, Inter for body. Minimal on purpose — whitespace is the design, like a newspaper.
• BuildWordPress + Elementor built from scratch, no templates, no plugins. I was a beginner and had to learn Elementor by experimenting. My professor said use templates — I refused.
• ContentEmbedded YouTube videos instead of uploading to WordPress to keep it fast. No heavy plugins. Used keywords from his actual work for basic SEO.

Hardest part: Responsive. In Elementor without premium you can't make the header sticky, you can't control everything. Tablet and mobile had to be done separately. So many things you can't control unlike pure code. That was the most painful part as a beginner.

A clear archive editors can actually use.

We launched with no performance issues — site was fast because it was mostly text and YouTube embeds, no plugin bloat. He didn't give specific feedback like "editors find me faster now" but he immediately asked for an additional section on the portfolio page, then asked if he could edit it himself. I sent him a simple guide and he took over.

Took over a month, not because of build time — because of waiting. Waiting for images, videos, domain, hosting. I had already built most of it on the free test host before he even bought the domain.

This was my first real client. I was still in community college, didn't know HTML/CSS/JS yet. Looking back, it's the project that made me love building from scratch even if it was on Elementor.

If I rebuilt it today.

I reached out to Robert recently and I asked if I could rebuild his website in pure HTML/CSS. He hasn't replied yet, but if I did:

• Performance100/100 on Pagespeed, Accessibility, SEO, Best Practices — no builder overhead
• SEOFull basic setup: sitemap.xml, robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, OG tags, meta — not just keywords
• ModernSticky header without premium, perfect responsive (no separate tablet hacks), lighter code
• Own itHe'd own the files, host anywhere — no WordPress lock-in, no Elementor dependency

The newspaper vibe would stay — white, black, serif + sans, whitespace — but executed with the speed and control I have now.