the old roywrench.com ran on squarespace. it worked. it was also slow, generic, and impossible to make feel like mine. so it’s gone.
this one is built on astro and deployed on vercel, which in plain terms means it’s fast, it’s mostly static, and it costs almost nothing to run. that’s most of what you want from a photography site: get out of the image’s way and load quickly.
the part worth writing about is how it got made. i didn’t hand-build it page by page. i planned and orchestrated it with claude (the model, if you’re curious, is fable 5), running a set of agents in parallel. some researching, some designing, some writing the actual code, each in its own lane.
first move was to not lose anything. before touching the old site we scraped all 52 pages and built a manifest of 1,480 images, so every project and every frame was accounted for before squarespace went dark.
then the rule that made the rest sane: lock the design system before writing a single line of page code. fonts, colours, spacing, the voice these words are written in. all decided and written down first. after that, building pages is just following your own instructions instead of arguing with yourself in the dark.
this is the first thing in the lab. fitting that it’s the site explaining itself. [shipped]