Splitting one site into three, by what each one asks of the reader
My Digital Platform · in progress
- Role
- Practice positioning; Information architecture; Editorial direction
- Timeframe
- Direction established August 2026. Local manuscript reviewed September 10, 2026.
I separated the planned web presence by purpose: engineering employment, consulting work, and the wider creative practice. Projects can appear on multiple surfaces with different framing and consistent underlying facts.
About the project
My sites, shared interface components, and content publishing system. The engineering site, gideonjr.dev, is one application within the platform. The wider scope includes the consulting and creative-practice surfaces and the components they can share.
- Timeframe
- Current
Overview
Different purposes within one practice
My work spans Art, Design, Sustainability, and Music, alongside the engineering and consulting work I want people to hire me for. Putting all of it on one site left me trying to introduce the full practice and explain a particular offer at the same time.
I chose three surfaces with different purposes: an engineering site for employment, a consulting site for paid work, and a studio site for the wider practice. A project could appear on more than one surface when it helped explain a different part of the work.
Finding a useful boundary
My first division was engineering on one side and creative work on the other. That did not fit the projects very well. Black Wall Street Journey involved an exhibition and a content system. The Blueprint involved cultural programming and the engineering needed to publish it. Removing either from the engineering site would remove substantial work I had owned end to end.
Design also runs through the other areas of my practice. Designing a composting system or music direction cannot be sorted cleanly by the medium of the finished result. A subject-based division would make me keep deciding which part of a project mattered most just to choose where it belonged.
I could have kept one site with clear routes for different audiences. That would mean fewer surfaces to maintain. I chose separate sites because I wanted each introduction to establish its purpose immediately, before the reader had to sort through the rest of the practice.
Solution
Giving each surface a purpose
The plan assigns employment to gideonjr.dev. Its writing explains the engineering choices, my role in them, and the consequences of the implementation.
The consulting surface at gideonjr.com is intended to help someone understand what they could make with me. That work can come from any of the four areas of the practice.
The studio surface at gideonjr.studio is intended to hold the work without requiring an employment or consulting enquiry. It gives the wider practice room to be encountered on its own terms, including the overlaps between those areas.
Those are editorial responsibilities for the three surfaces. They do not require three isolated implementations. The shared platform can provide components and content infrastructure while each site controls its introduction, selection, and presentation.
- Employment · consulting · practice → One site: All readers arrive here
- One site → The same body of work: One presentation
Keeping the same work in view
On the engineering site, Blueprint can explain imports, domain modeling, and operating a service through a seasonal traffic spike. Black Wall Street Journey can explain how the same research supported a timed installation and a reader-controlled website.
Those projects can also appear in the wider practice through their cultural context and the experience of encountering them. The facts and ownership should remain consistent. What changes is the part of the work the page develops for its reader.
The studio can also give someone considering the consulting practice concrete examples of the range of work. I do not want the services page to carry that explanation through description alone. The relationship gives readers somewhere to go further, without making every studio visit an enquiry.
Sharing behavior across the sites
The Kinetic Practice Statement is a later example of how this separation can work. The personal, engineering, and consulting compositions use different sentences while sharing the interaction that changes part of the statement.
Extracting that behavior into the platform does not make the three introductions interchangeable. Each keeps its vocabulary and purpose. The engineering-site integration is working; the other compositions demonstrate the shared component in Storybook. Their presence there does not establish that the site migration is finished.
Reflection
Keeping the work connected across surfaces
Separating the sites gives me room to explain the engineering work directly while keeping the wider practice available elsewhere. It also gives me more to maintain. Content that appears in two places can drift, and someone arriving through a search for my name may need help understanding how the sites relate.
There is a cost to the narrower engineering introduction too. The range of my practice is part of what makes the work mine. I want the engineering account to be clear without making that range difficult to discover.
The three-surface structure remains a plan being implemented. I have not established that visitors understand the separation or that it improves employment or consulting enquiries. The next useful check is whether each surface makes its purpose clear and gives an interested reader a sensible route to the others.