Notes from the workbench

A new bekee.com

The site you’re looking at didn’t exist three days ago. The old one had been around a long time, built on Elementor, and had quietly become a CMS with my name on it rather than a website that read like me. It ran. It looked fine. It didn’t do what a calling card is supposed to do.

So I tore it down to the studs. The new bekee.com is a custom WordPress block theme, written from scratch, on a brand brief I worked through with Claude. The build was three days; the thinking was longer.

A few things that survived: the legacy blog (twenty-some years of it, in roughly the state I left it; there’s a popup on the way in). The orange. The b mark. Most of the actual identity. This wasn’t a reinvention; it was a translation.

A few things that changed: the structure; the type system; the voice (calmer, semicolons over em dashes, less throat-clearing). And one new thing: a writing surface that isn’t the legacy blog, where I can put thoughts down without dragging them through twenty-two years of context.

Written by

Bekee Gibson

Director of Usability + Web Development at Earthling Interactive in Madison, WI; owner of gibson•works, llc. Twenty-five years of HTML, accessibility, and listening before building. More about me →