Danni — a model portfolio & booking site
We built bookdanni.com — an editorial WordPress portfolio and booking site for an American model, with work organised into four galleries, a blog and a contact flow. Designed and launched in three days, and run by her since without us.
The brief
A working model needed an editorial portfolio she could send to clients — and update herself — live in days.
A model's portfolio is a hiring tool, and the person doing the hiring is scanning rather than reading. A casting director arrives looking for a specific kind of work — beauty, fashion, digitals, commercial — and needs to find that category, judge it in a few seconds, and get to a way of making contact. Anything that slows that path down costs a booking, and most portfolio templates slow it down considerably by treating the images as a single undifferentiated stream.
The second constraint was time. This kind of site has a cost to not existing that accrues daily, and a four-week design process is the wrong answer even when it produces a better site at the end. It needed to be live in days.
The third was independence. Portfolios change constantly — new shoots, new categories, work that gets pulled. A site she has to ask someone to update is a site that goes out of date, and a model whose portfolio is six months stale is being judged on six-month-old work.
The build
A WordPress build — Astra with Elementor on top — with the work split into four galleries by category — beauty, fashion, digitals and commercial — so the visitor self-selects immediately instead of scrolling to find the kind of work they came for. An editorial hero carries the first impression, a blog gives her somewhere to publish that is not a social platform she does not own, and a contact flow closes the path from looking to booking.
Elementor was the deliberate choice rather than the lazy one. For a site whose entire value is being current, the editing experience is the feature: she adds a shoot, reorders a gallery and changes a page herself, with no developer in the loop and no deployment. That is worth more here than any performance gain a hand-built theme would have bought.
It went from design to launch in three days and she has run it since. Checked on 12 September 2026 it is still live on WordPress 6.9.7, running the Astra theme with Elementor 3.35.7, all four galleries in place. WooCommerce is also installed with a cart path present — that was not part of what we were asked to build, and we note it because it is there in the source rather than claim a three-day portfolio as ecommerce work. This project is evidence of one specific thing: small WordPress builds, shipped fast, handed over completely enough that the client is still running them a year on.
Architecture
An editorial portfolio, self-managed.
A clean WordPress site with category galleries, a blog and a contact flow Danni runs herself.
Build timeline
Three days.
Design + setup
Editorial layout and WordPress setup.
Portfolio galleries
Beauty, fashion, digitals and commercial.
Blog + contact
Blog and the get-in-touch / booking flow.
QA + launch
Mobile QA and launch.
Results · live site
By the numbers.
Tech we used
A small stack.
More build work.
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