Fifteen to twenty days. That’s roughly what this website rebuild took. Full-time work, on-site, on a platform I had never touched before.

I did it myself.

Not because I had to. Because I was curious. Showit had a reputation I kept hearing about, and I had the time to actually dedicate to learning it properly. Three weeks in… still no regrets. The time wasn’t lost. It was tuition. I came out the other side with a fluency I didn’t have before, and a confidence that I could build another site, or help someone else through theirs.

Start With the Images

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about building a site as a photographer. The images are the outline. Not an afterthought. Not something you slot in once the copy’s done.

I pulled the full catalog first. Branding, travel, portraiture, food, personal. Renamed everything, resized, wrote the alt text. Only then did I let myself write a single word of page copy. Writing content first and slotting images in after works backwards for a business built on pictures.

The Canvas Moment

Every new platform has one moment where it clicks. Mine was understanding the Canvases, the elements that carry through every page, versus static design pieces that stay put on one page only. Once that landed, Showit stopped feeling like a foreign language. Before that, I was just stumbling around a bit.

“We Found Another Issue”

Two weeks after launch, mid-fix, I said exactly that out loud. Because we did. A slug problem, buried in gallery URLs that Showit defaults to its own internal template names unless you catch every single one and rename it before publishing. I didn’t catch all of them. Or really very many of them, urg.

Lesson learned, and now it’s a permanent line item on any future build. Redirects protect the old links. Slugs make sure the new ones are actually good. Two different jobs. I’d been treating them like one.

What I’m Proud Of

Home and About, for nailing the voice. I can feel myself on those pages, which is the whole point. The Press page is a more in your face personal favorite. And the Blog is the single biggest structural upgrade from where the old site started, real categories, real functionality, a place for the writing to actually live and breathe.

It’s the same feeling I want every branding client and food client to have the second they land on the site. That they’ve found exactly the right person.

The Honest Middle of a Website Rebuild

I worked through most of this hands-on, with some help from Claude along the way for research and drafting. One tool in a very long list that included Showit’s own support team (who solved every technical wall I hit, sitemap syncing, WordPress timing, things I never could have solved alone) and a staging site that let me preview the whole thing before anyone else saw it.

The site has real depth now. Real history. A voice-first foundation instead of a template wearing my name. And a skill set that carries forward to whatever I build next.

Onward. xx J.