Elliott Young Design

Problem

Elliott Young Design is an architectural technology practice in the North East of England, registered with the Chartered Institute of Architectural Technologists. The work is remodelling and extending homes, produced in AutoCAD with 3D modelling and rendering — which means the practice sells on images, and a website that does not do the images justice actively costs work.

Two jobs in sequence: a personal portfolio first, then the practice site.

The constraints were the ones that make small commissions hard. No budget for anything with a monthly bill. A client who knows exactly what looks right without necessarily having the vocabulary to specify it. And an owner who is an architectural technologist, not a sysadmin, and should never have to think about the site's infrastructure again.

Approach

Both are React applications built with Vite, routed client-side, and deployed as static files to GitHub Pages. No server means no hosting bill, nothing to patch, and nothing that breaks quietly two years later — This was after discussions about how they wanted to host it, and costs for each option.

The rest followed from what the practice is selling:

• Image zoom on the practice site, so a visitor can inspect a render or a finished extension closely without leaving the page. For a business whose product is visual detail, "click to see it properly" is a functional requirement, not a flourish.
• Three.js, through react-three/fiber and drei, on the portfolio — fitting for someone whose day job is 3D modelling.
• A Leaflet map, because a residential practice is a local business and people want to know whether it covers where they live.
• Motion via framer-motion and scroll-triggered animation, used to pace the work down the page rather than to decorate it.
• EmailJS for the contact forms, so enquiries reach an inbox without standing up a server, a database, or a form handler needing maintenance.

I worked out the design with Elliott in conversation rather than from a brief — talking through what he wanted, proposing how it could work, and then building it — and implemented the result.

Outcome

Both sites are live, and they belong to the client: static files on free hosting, with nothing to renew and no dependency that fails silently.

This was my first commissioned work, and the part worth keeping was not technical. Everything else in this portfolio is work I scoped myself, where I decided what finished looked like. Here somebody else did, and getting there meant pulling requirements out of a person who thinks visually, then treating "it doesn't feel right yet" as real feedback to be turned into a specific change. That is a genuinely different skill from the infrastructure work, and better practised on a friend's business than on a stranger's.