Peter Salem

Long time collaborator and designer Sophie Gibson brought me into this project when Peter’s existing Wordpress site went down. The aim was to create a new site that would distinguish Peter and his work well beyond his peers.

As his site was down, we started initially by creating a single-page ‘business card’ site to ensure his web domain was not a dead page. This step of creating a ‘simple’ site is generally a good idea on any project with nothing live. Whether it is replacing a legacy site or starting from scratch, it spurs on the conversations for design and content immediately in a smaller, more manageable piece of work and ensures the domain isn’t left vacant.

We then moved onto creating a fuller, structured and branded website that Peter could populate and edit himself. As typical for me, I chose the SALT stack:

• Statamic: CMS
• Alpine: JavaScript
• Laravel: PHP
• Tailwind: CSS

This initial build in Spring 2022 outlined the content structure, built out some templates and made some broad aesthetic design choices. This phase also explored and tuned the authoring experience. We then paused development on the project for a few months as Peter needed time to compile and add content –he was also incredibly busy and travelling quite a bit.

A few months later we came together again to prepare the site for launching. Along with some general maintenance (software updates mainly as a lot changes in 6 months in the realm of web tech), we further honed the design and content. We launched the site mid-September 2022.