Siegel & Strain

I rebuilt siegelstrain.com on a custom WordPress theme built with ACF Pro, replacing an aging install that ran on the Bridge theme and the WPBakery page builder. Rather than carry over years of accumulated clutter, I built an automated migration pipeline that moved only the content the old site actually used (published, linked, reachable pages and the images they actually reference), which meant sorting through more than 13,000 inherited image files (2.4 GB) down to the ones still doing work on the site. The site keeps WordPress’s classic editor rather than the newer block editor, and nested page URLs were preserved wherever possible so existing links kept working. It went live in August 2026 and now carries the firm’s full archive of 55 projects.

The firm’s Who We Are page carries 28 team profiles, each with a portrait and an expandable bio. The old site had never modeled staff as their own content (the entire roster was hand-built HTML embedded straight in the page), so I rebuilt it as a single repeater field the client can edit from one screen, where adding a new hire means adding one new row instead of a new page. Portraits and bios both migrated automatically, pulled from the rendered markup rather than retyped by hand.

Every project’s photo gallery on the old site lived inside a slider plugin’s own database table, keyed to a shortcode ID, not inside the page content itself, so a straightforward scan of what images appeared on each page would have missed them entirely. I wrote a script that joined that plugin table against the rendered pages to resolve each gallery image back to its project, which recovered 51 real project photos that a simpler pass had already flagged as unused and would have deleted outright. Across the roughly 2,400 images inherited from the old site, automated rules were enough to decide the fate of all but 33, which I reviewed by hand. Siegel & Strain is a Bay Area architecture firm based in Emeryville, known for sustainable civic, educational, and cultural buildings, and those project galleries are the primary visual content on the site.