Gemma Malenoir Photography.
A gallery-grade site for a wildlife and documentary photographer, hand-built so the photographs lead and nothing gets in their way.
- Client
- Gemma Malenoir
- Field
- Wildlife and documentary photography, Bristol
- What I did
- Design, hand-coded build, print collections, domain move, SEO
- Live since September 2026
- gemmamalenoir.com
The brief.
Gemma Malenoir photographs wildlife and wild places: conservation stories that have run from the street herons of Amsterdam to the rainforests of Borneo, and covers for titles like Life Nature Magazine. Work of that calibre needs a website that behaves like a gallery. The images hold every bit of their colour, and the site itself gets quietly out of the way.
She needed one place to do several things well: sell fine-art print collections, show a portfolio meant to be seen rather than sold, present her published features, and open the door to commission and expedition work. A template was never going to do it. They compress photographs, load slowly, and make every photographer's site look like every other one.
The build.
A bespoke site on a dark, editorial canvas, designed and hand-coded from scratch, with no template and no page-builder. Restrained type and generous space frame the work. A full-screen film of a wolf opens the homepage before giving way to the print collections.
Every part of the interface is there to serve the photography and then disappear. The site behaves like a gallery: calm, considered, and quietly technical under the surface.
Under the hood.
Big, rich photographs that appear the moment you arrive, on a site that's cheap to run and simple to look after.
Photography that loads instantly
Next-generation AVIF images with WebP fallbacks, each served at the right size for the screen it lands on, with fonts and the hero preloaded and everything else lazy-loaded.
Print collections, built to sell
Her collections are structured to be browsed and bought, and to grow as new expeditions come back: a foundation for print sales rather than a static gallery.
Accessible by design
Skip links, properly labelled navigation and clean semantic structure, so the site works for everyone and reads clearly to search engines at the same time.
Found online, shared beautifully
Structured data, Open Graph and Twitter cards and canonical URLs throughout, so Gemma's work surfaces properly in search and looks right the moment it's shared.
Motion with restraint
Content reveals gently as you scroll. A site with a pulse, never a circus.
Built to last
Hand-written HTML and CSS with no plugins to break: fast to load, cheap to run, and simple to look after year on year.
Where it stands.
What's built feels like Gemma's work: calm, considered and quietly technical underneath. It's fast, it reads clearly to search engines, it's set up to sell prints and to pitch her for commissions, and it's made to be looked after rather than torn down and rebuilt every couple of years.
It went live in September 2026 at gemmamalenoir.com, replacing a Squarespace site she'd had since 2020 and the monthly subscription that came with it. I moved the domain and hosting across as part of the job with no downtime: the old site stayed up until the new one was ready, and the print collections are open for orders.
“Tom rebuilt my site from Squarespace into something that actually looks like my work: dark, quiet, the photographs doing the talking. The print shop just works, and he handled the whole domain move so I didn't have to think about it.”Gemma Malenoir, wildlife and documentary photographer, gemmamalenoir.com
Tell me about
your idea.
No obligation, no hard sell. A friendly chat about what you're after and whether I'm the right fit.
hello@tomchard.uk