PFA Website Revamp

The Problem

Peabody Fine Architects designs passive homes and green buildings in Northern Virginia. Their website didn’t reflect that. An outdated WordPress theme, years of accumulated plugin cruft, and a confusing admin interface made the site hard to update and harder to take seriously. The site was also hosted on a generic *.wpengine.com subdomain—redirected from their real domain, greenhaus.org—which meant search engines weren’t giving PFA full credit for their own content.

Matt Fine, who recently took majority control of the practice, needed a site that communicated PFA’s mission clearly and that he could manage himself while running the business.

What We Built

We designed a new WordPress theme from scratch around PFA’s existing soft blue brand palette and a new “PFA” logomark. The design leans on photography—large images of completed projects do the talking, supported by clean typography and a straightforward layout. Show the work, explain the thinking, get out of the way.

Under the hood, we enabled WordPress’s block editor and implemented the key design elements as custom blocks. This gives Matt a visual editing experience instead of a wall of shortcodes and custom fields. We cut the plugin count significantly, which improved page load times and reduced the surface area for things to break. We also reorganized the WordPress admin navigation so the content Matt updates most often is easy to find.

Finally, we moved the site onto its proper domain, so PFA’s SEO authority lives where it belongs.

The Outcome

Matt can now add project pages, write posts, and update content without calling a developer. The site loads faster, looks like the practice it represents, and ranks under PFA’s own domain. A small project with a clear brief and a real result.