Overview

Early on in my gap year, I was invited to work with James Nickells, a local artist painting 193 portraits, one for each UN member country. Each portrait focuses on an individual with a significant environmental story, and aims to raise awareness of the environmental work happening across the globe. I was asked to help him improve his existing website, which had been built using Squarespace.

The Problem

The previous site had a fragmented approach, with no centralised templates. Each page required individual updates, meaning consistency across the site was impossible - nobody was going to work through 50 pages just to change a heading style. 

Beyond these issues, I noticed early on that the portraits themselves were low profile on the website. I set about designing a new country page with them front and centre.

However, as we began rolling this out more widely, I encountered an issue: Squarespace limit pages in 'portfolios' to 60 items. Quite simply, this meant that 193 portraits just wouldn't fit into a Squarespace site - hugely frustrating, but useful to have caught now!

The Solution

With James' support, I embarked on a full rebuild of the site, moving it off Squarespace entirely and onto a custom 11ty platform, with Directus CMS powering it behind the scenes. The move to 11ty meant that each page could be generated from a single template, embedding a single consistent style across the site.

Having more control over the raw HTML also allowed me to improve the navigation, creating a card layout on the homepage to maximise space and help distinguish key pieces of information. 

Migrating all of the country pages off Squarespace was a challenge - as the pages had no consistent structure, there was no easy way to automatically extract each piece of data, so it was a largely manual process. Over three weeks, I migrated over 50 countries, with 500 images between them, transitioning them all into the new structure on Directus.

Outcomes

80% decrease in monthly runnning costs.

The new website launched at the end of March 2026, and is accessible at globalportraitproject.com

The serverless nature of 11ty means that it is less susceptible to downtime compared to other solutions, and the monthly cost of the new website is roughly 80% cheaper than the previous Squarespace site! As an added bonus, the site is substantially more efficient, resulting in fewer carbon emissions, tying into the project's overall environmental focus. Pages load faster, and the site achieves a near perfect Lighthouse score - quite an improvement over the old one!

Future

Just because the website is live, doesn't mean it's finished! James and I are continuing to discuss tweaks, improvements, and changes which will enhance the website overall. 

James is overjoyed with the new website, and feels it is a huge improvement on the old one.

I’d love to say thank you for listening to my problems and collaboratively working towards a greatly improved solution.

It was a pleasure working with him, and fingers crossed this website will now grow with him and the project.

October 2026