Built to still work in five years
A practice's portfolio site should not need rescuing every eighteen months. We designed for a long, low-maintenance life rather than for whatever happens to be fashionable this year.
Case Study
A twenty-eight page site for a Calgary architecture practice — designed to be browsed, found in search, and added to for years.
The brief
PiXEL designs healthcare clinics, pharmacies, rowhouses, logistics facilities and community centres across Alberta and Western Canada. Their work is visual, technical and permit-bound — and it needed a site that could carry twenty-three project stories without turning into a maintenance burden.
We designed and built the whole thing: the visual identity of the site, the project archive that sits at its centre, and the launch onto the practice's own domain. The priority throughout was longevity — a site that stays fast, stays findable, and can still be updated easily long after launch day.
What we built
The site covers PiXEL's full offering — architecture design, interior design, BIM, animation and visualization, planning and urban design, and landscape design — and walks a prospective client through the practice's four-stage process, from discovery through approvals to delivery.
The heart of it is the project archive: twenty-three detail pages, each with a hero image, an overview, the design approach, the approvals narrative, and a specification panel carrying category, location, size, status and services. They're indexed on a grid that filters instantly across five sectors — healthcare, commercial, residential, industrial and community.
Interaction is deliberately quiet: a slow-drifting hero, full-screen image galleries that open on click and move with the arrow keys, gentle reveals as you scroll, and a contact form that catches mistakes before the visitor hits send. Nothing that competes with the architecture.
How we approached it
A practice's portfolio site should not need rescuing every eighteen months. We designed for a long, low-maintenance life rather than for whatever happens to be fashionable this year.
Architecture sites live or die on photography, and photography is heavy. Each image was prepared individually so the pages stay quick without the work ever looking compromised.
Every project page is properly described, correctly indexed and shareable — so a search for the kind of work PiXEL does can actually surface the project that proves they do it.
Nothing goes live unseen. Work in progress is shared as a private link the client can open on their own phone, and only reaches the public site once they've approved it.
The brief was never "make it look good." It was: make it load fast, make it easy to find, and make it easy to keep current.
Accuracy
Architecture is a licensed field, and a portfolio site makes claims that carry real weight — professional registrations, building-code references, occupancy classifications, who acted as architect of record on which project. We worked through all of it with the client line by line rather than writing marketing copy around it.
No invented awards, no borrowed credentials, no filler project details. Everything on the site is something the practice can stand behind.
Outcome
PiXEL's site is live, fast and fully indexed, and adding the twenty-fourth project is a small, routine job rather than a redesign. The practice can keep publishing work as it completes.
The relationship didn't end at launch. New project pages, content updates and performance work continue on the same footing — because the site was built to be edited, not admired once and left alone.
Tell us what you're trying to build. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.