• FTF Engineering FTF Engineering
• Parkmerced Parkmerced
• Reem Al Zahabi Reem Al Zahabi
• Siegel & Strain Siegel & Strain
• Cheng Design Cheng Design
• In-Person Therapy In-Person Therapy
• Michael Guy Thompson, PhD Michael Guy Thompson, PhD
• SF Home Care SF Home Care
• Bay Door Clinic Bay Door Clinic
• Book Interiors Book Interiors

Cheng Design

Website

Design System

SEO Migration

I rebuilt Cheng Design’s site from the Salient WordPress theme they’d been running to 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 published pages in total. 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. 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.

Preview the dev build

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.

Cheng Design is a Berkeley architecture and design firm whose site carries a full project archive, an education center, and press coverage, with search history stretching back to 2010. Before touching a template, I built a census of 1,449 old URLs, cross-referenced it against their Search Console history, and wrote 336 redirect rules to preserve them. I verified all 1,449 against the new site one by one – 1,448 passed, and every one of the 3,270 clicks Search Console had measured on the old site landed on a working page. The same rigor carried into the page copy: all 81 live pages now carry a distinct, correctly sized search title and description, replacing a one-size-fits-all tag that Google had been truncating on 63 of them.