Cheng Design

I rebuilt Cheng Design’s website from the Salient WordPress theme they’d been running 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. 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.

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.

Cheng Design’s site carries a full project archive, an Education Center, and years of press coverage, much of it with search history behind it. 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. The same rigor went into the page copy: every page now carries its own correctly sized search title and description, replacing a one-size-fits-all tag that Google had been truncating.