Dr. Louise K. Blight
Seabird science, urban birds and writing. Credibility first, book second.
Discovery, design, build, handover
2026
Static HTML/CSS/JS
Self-hosted fonts
WebP
No CMS
No analytics
Dr. Louise K. Blight is a conservation biologist. PhD in zoology from UBC, adjunct professor at UVic, co-chair of the birds sub-committee at COSEWIC. Her first book, Where the Earth Meets the Sky, was coming out with Penguin Random House Canada in April 2026.
Her public presence was spread across academic profiles and publisher pages, and it made her look like a book launch instead of a scientist. The site had to fix that. The launch date could not move: design signed off in late February, build finished by early March, live before the book.
One line from discovery set the whole brief: “I care about science and writing books rather than any other fancy stuff.” After that, every decision got tested against a single question. Does this make her look like a scientist, or like marketing?
Peers and conservation professionals want rigour and publications. General readers want a way in. The page order handles both: research leads, and the book sits inside it rather than on top of it.
Static only. Updates one to four times a year. No newsletter, no analytics, no tracking. WCAG compliance. She supplies all content. Those limits killed more bad options than any mood board.
Hand-built static HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No CMS, no build step, no plugins. A site updated a handful of times a year does not need a database, and static files cannot be broken by the next plugin vulnerability. Whoever administers the domain can read the whole thing.
Her Antarctic and Salish Sea photographs carry the page. Four gallery collections with a keyboard-accessible lightbox, imagery served as WebP, fonts self-hosted at 168 KB in total instead of pulled from a font CDN.
No analytics, no third-party scripts, and no cookie banner, because there is nothing to consent to. I checked the live page: zero tracking scripts.
If the publisher assets slipped, the plan was to launch a lite version with home, about, research and contact, then add the book page afterwards. Launch date was the only item that could not move, so it got its own plan B.
Six sections: home, about, projects, publications, writing and impressions, plus a contact page, a gallery with lightbox, sitemap, robots and a privacy page. The whole site is a few hundred kilobytes of HTML, one stylesheet and one script.
Live at louiseblight.ca. The launch slipped past the March date, because the book release had her stretched thin, and that turned out not to matter. The site was ready when she was.
The lite-launch contingency was never needed. The publisher assets arrived on time and the book page went live with everything else.
Handover includes a validation script that checks every page, image, font, script, sitemap and robots file. It runs green: “Site validation passed: pages, images, fonts, scripts, sitemap, and robots.txt are valid.”
No analytics, no third-party scripts and no cookie banner on the live site. The domain is hers, the hosting is not with me, and the files are plain enough that the handover did not need me either.
Content edits happen in a text editor, which is what she actually does: one to four times a year.
Two things were still open when discovery ended: which publications to feature, and whether press-kit material was wanted. Both got sorted during the build, but those were the two moments where the schedule came closest to the edge. Next time I would close them in discovery and price the press kit as its own line. The other lesson is about dates. A launch date that bends around a client’s life beats one that holds and hurts, and it is worth agreeing that up front instead of defending a date nobody needs.