Estate record website

The first version was a stock blog-theme site: a gray hero, sidebar widgets, an apology post, a contact link that went nowhere. The strategic call was to stop presenting it as a personal appeal and present it as evidence — a library of collected documents.

That reframing drove everything: the original text wasn’t rewritten but broken into statement chunks with plain-language notes in a margin column, so a non-expert can follow the record; public documents each get a described entry (what it is and why it matters, before you open it) instead of bare attachments; and a gated tier holds the certified court copies, released on request.

Built static (Eleventy), custom editorial design — serif headlines, navy header, generous whitespace, the annotated margin layout throughout. Navigation became a real journey: read the statement, examine the documents, request access or ask a question, where the old site dead-ended at a contact link.

Design judgment in the hardest direction — restraint. A proof-only record can’t look like a campaign, so there’s no hero appeal, no pull-quotes engineered for impact, no conversion layout; the design presents rather than persuades, and any weight the reader feels comes from the record itself.

Knowing that the right move was a library and not a louder blog post is the whole job here — the strategy call, not just the build. And it runs end-to-end: design, build, a tested gated-access tier with per-request document release, and a real launch.

You have information that’s technically all there but no one can actually use it, and you need it turned into something a real person can navigate.