Building emilyharju.co
I needed a portfolio that showed both sides of my work, the systems and the brand, and that I could keep up to date myself. So I designed and built this site from scratch with Claude Code, from the first design directions to a live site on my own domain, in about a week.
The problem
My work lived in documents, decks and internal tools that nobody outside the company could see. I needed one place that told the story clearly, in my own brand and voice, without sharing anything that wasn't mine to share.
Constraints
Easy to keep current
I wanted to change the words myself, without touching code or waiting on anyone.
Private by default
No company figures, and no email address on the page for spam bots to collect.
Free or close to it
Hosting, the contact form and analytics all had to run on free plans.
My brand, not my employer's
The site needed my own colours, type and voice.
Key decisions
Explore before building.
I compared three home page directions, picked one, and later reshaped the layout after studying studio sites I admired.
Keep it plain.
Plain HTML with one shared stylesheet, no framework and no build step. It loads fast, costs nothing to host, and will still work years from now.
One source for every case study.
Case studies are written once in my portfolio folder and pulled into the site by a small script, so the site and my portfolio never drift apart.
Private by design.
I removed every company figure and kept my email off the page. Messages come through a form that delivers to my inbox and ends on a thank-you page.
Make change easy.
The words live in plain text files. I edit them, double-click Publish, review what changed and confirm. A design guide names every piece of the site, so I know exactly what to ask for.
How it works
Brand pieces
Made alongside the site, in the same colours and type.
Outcome
- A live site on my own domain, with the second domain redirecting to it.
- Eleven case studies, a testimonials page, and pages for cooking and gardening.
- A working contact form, branded link previews, clean web addresses and privacy-friendly analytics, all on free plans.
- A publishing workflow I can run myself, in plain text.
What I'd do differently
- Set up the plain-text editing from day one. Adding it after the pages were built meant labelling every piece of text in one pass.