The front door of my business
This site is the home of my freelance work: the place where potential clients find what I do, where I publish the blog, and where my clients sign in to follow their own project. It’s the one project where I’m my own client — and I built it the way I build for paying ones, because a site that sells careful work has to be careful work.
This is also the website my open-source theme Astro Rocket grew out of — the two still share one foundation.
First came this website. Then the website became a theme.
What my clients get: the portal
Behind the Login button in the header sits a working client portal. Clients sign in without a password — a sign-in link goes to the email address their invoices are sent to — and land on a dashboard with their outstanding balance, their active projects, and every invoice, downloadable as the official PDF. No “please find attached” emails, no asking me to resend anything: the current state of their account, whenever they want it.
The numbers come live from my bookkeeping (Moneybird) at the moment the page renders. The portal keeps no records of its own — nothing is copied, nothing can go stale, and there’s nothing to breach.
If you want the full technical story — the passwordless flow, the security decisions, the live bookkeeping wiring — I wrote it up in the portal blog post.
Design decisions worth noticing
Three choices on this site say the most about how I work:
- The homepage hero is locked. One vertical wash from brand blue down to black, identical in light and dark mode — on purpose. The first screen is the brand’s one chance to make an impression, and I didn’t want a visitor’s OS setting quietly changing the mood of my front door.
- The inner pages flip their technique with the colour mode. In light mode, a faint architectural grid like pale blueprint paper sits behind the heading; in dark mode, the grid gives way to a soft beam of brand light falling from beneath the header. Structure drawn in lines by day, painted in light by night — two moods from one idea, both pure CSS.
- Motion with manners. Sections arrive with a tiny spring, cards cascade into place, and on desktop a brand-blue cursor trail follows your pointer — but the moment you’ve set
prefers-reduced-motion, the whole layer steps aside. Motion is a treat for people who want it, never a tax on people who don’t.
One foundation with Astro Rocket
The design system, the components, the SEO layer, the forms, the colour-mode system — this site is where they were born. It wasn’t even finished when Astro Rocket split off from it; from that point the two evolved side by side, and improvements still flow both ways. This site is the proof that the foundation holds up in production, running a real business every day. The story of the theme itself has a project page of its own.
I’m proud of this one
I don’t say that lightly about my own work. But this is the rare project where the design, the code, the performance, and the foundation all came together exactly the way I pictured them — a site that’s fast, accessible, genuinely mine, the birthplace of a theme I’m happy to put my name on twice, and now earning its keep as the front door to my actual business, invoices and all.