Case study
The Art of Bruce Thomson
A permanent home for a Scottish artist's work, rebuilt off Squarespace with Claude on Cloudflare.
Artist's archive · Ongoing · Site design, gallery handling, SEO · Claude Design · Cloudflare Pages · per-artwork static pages · structured data
Live site: brucethomson.art
A personal project
This is a personal project. My father, Bruce Thomson, was a gifted Scottish artist who passed away and left behind more work than most people ever saw. I wanted to build a place where all of it could live, properly presented, and findable by anyone searching for his name.
Read the full case study: how I rebuilt it with Claude →
Off Squarespace, onto Cloudflare with Claude
The site was rebuilt off Squarespace with Claude Design and now runs on Cloudflare Pages, which hosts it for nothing. Claude Design gave a flexibility a template never could, so the layout bends to art that ranges from near-square etchings to portraits five times taller than they are wide. The build stays fast even under close to a hundred images, and every work has its own page so search engines can reach it. I wrote up the whole build, from the extraction to getting it found, as a full case study in the journal.
Search engines can't see paintings. The SEO is the part of the work that lets the art find the right people.
Words for an image-led site
What often gets missed on art portfolio sites is the written content. Galleries are visual by nature, and it's tempting to let the images do all the work. But search engines can't see paintings. The SEO was built in from the start: hand-written descriptions, carefully chosen keywords for anyone searching for Scottish art or my father's name, and structured metadata so the work surfaces where it should.
The method behind it is written up for any artist to use: a free one-page Quick Reference and the full Art Website SEO Playbook.
The homepage in full
An ongoing relationship
This is an ongoing project. We've only catalogued a fraction of what he left behind. Each time I add a new piece, I'm seeing work I hadn't seen before, or rediscovering something I'd forgotten. Building the site has been a way of spending time with the art, and by extension with him.
What I'd take from this
Some sites aren't products. They're artefacts. They're places that make a body of work findable, citable, and durable — long after the original creator can advocate for it themselves. That's a different kind of brief, and it deserves the same craft as commercial work.