Overview
A professional portfolio site for television director Mike Lacey, built with Astro 5 and Sanity CMS. The site features a career timeline, production credits grid, photo and video galleries with lightbox, testimonials, a contact form with auto-generated QR code vCards, and dynamic OG image generation - all managed through a headless CMS with live visual editing.
The Challenge
The client needed a site that could showcase decades of television production work across multiple formats - timeline narratives, photo galleries, video interviews, and production credits - while remaining easy to update without developer involvement. Content ordering, image focal points, and draft previewing all needed to work seamlessly from the CMS.
Approach
Built on Astro with server-side rendering for dynamic OG images and Sanity preview mode. Content is modeled across six Sanity document types with drag-and-drop ordering for timeline events. The site uses a fallback pattern where pages fetch from Sanity first, then gracefully degrade to local JSON if the CMS is unreachable. Interactive features like lightbox galleries, contact forms with Formspree integration, and QR code vCard generation are hydrated with React only when needed.
Outcome
Delivered a production-ready portfolio that the client updates independently through Sanity Studio. The site features responsive masonry galleries, YouTube and direct video embeds, a timeline biography with optional images, and a contact system that generates downloadable vCards. Visual editing via Sanity's Presentation tool allows real-time content previewing before publishing.