I rebuilt Cheng Design’s website into a custom theme built on ACF Pro. The new build covers the firm’s 20 custom home projects, an Education Center, a blog, books, press coverage, and client testimonials, 81 pages in all.
Much of that archive has years of search history behind it, so before touching a template I built a census of every old URL, cross-referenced it against the firm’s search data, and wrote redirect rules so that no old link would break, then checked each one against the new site. Rather than installing an SEO plugin, I wrote the search-metadata system directly into the theme, including an editor panel that shows a live Google search-result preview for every page. Every page now carries its own correctly sized search title and description, replacing a one-size-fits-all tag that Google had been truncating.
The theme also ships as a proper build: CSS and JavaScript are compiled and minified on deploy, cutting the front-end payload from about 985 KB of mostly-comment source down to roughly 30 KB gzipped.
The new site has not launched yet, so these screens come from the finished build rather than chengdesign.com.
The site defaults to a dark theme with a light-mode alternate, built on one shared set of CSS tokens for color, spacing, and type rather than per-page overrides. I paired Archivo for display type with Open Sans for body copy, both shipping with real italic weights instead of synthesized ones. I ran accessibility audits at both desktop and mobile viewports and brought the dark theme to a 100 accessibility score across nine key pages, fixing contrast and heading-order issues along the way.
The home page opens on a loader built from the logo itself. I vectorized the wordmark into two SVG paths, and CSS keyframes drop “CHENG” into place as “design” rises to meet it, with a hairline progress bar running beneath until the hero video starts to play. The motion is pure CSS, with JavaScript only deciding when the loader lifts, and visitors who prefer reduced motion see the finished mark without the movement.
This site was built by Kailash Black. Credits for any assets or images that aren't my own can be found on the Information page.