Michael Guy Thompson, PhD

I built michaelguythompson.com as a WordPress child theme on top of the default Twenty Nineteen theme, keeping the typefaces and layout Michael already had and rebuilding the pages underneath them. The homepage runs a full-bleed photograph behind a dark banner, with a quote that rotates every seven days and two book covers linking out to his book pages. The Curriculum Vitae, previously an iframe embedding a PDF more than twenty pages long, I converted into a plain page with anchor links to each section in the sidebar. To help him choose a direction, I also built a small toggle into the live site that switched the whole page between two complete stylesheets, so he could compare them in the browser rather than from static mockups.

The Publications page is the deep end of the site: four books (The Death of Desire, The Legacy of R.D. Laing, The Ethic of Honesty, and The Truth about Freud’s Technique) plus sections for downloadable journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, public lectures, and media appearances. Like the CV, it replaced an iframe with an in-page layout, so the content is indexable and the sidebar anchors jump straight to a section. Most entries link out to a PDF of the original piece.

Thompson works in the tradition of R.D. Laing: he edited The Legacy of R.D. Laing in 2015, and the main navigation links out to three affiliated organizations: Free Association, the R.D. Laing Symposium, and the Gnosis Retreat Center. Article titles on the site, like “The Myth of Mental Illness Redux” and the book subtitle “An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness,” point to his central argument: mental illness as an existential condition rather than a fixed diagnosis. The site has to hold a personal biography and a scholarly bibliography going back to 1985 side by side, so Biography, My Approach, Curriculum Vitae, and Publications stay as separate, equally weighted items in the main navigation instead of one combined about page.