A Custom Webflow Site for a Poet and Author
Brian Berry is a Blackpool poet with two published collections and a Masters in Creative Writing, taken up after a career in publishing. I built him a Webflow site on Client-First where every poem is browsable by form, theme and title.
- 20 works in one CMS collection - not a blogarchive.
- Filter by theme - eight, from Nature to Spirituality.
- Filter by poetic form - nine, Sonnet through to Haiku.
- Live title search, debounced - results updateas you type.
- Finsweet Attributes v2 - filters combine, notcompete.
- Load more, not pagination - the list keeps its place.
- GSAP scroll animations - poems arrive rather than appear.
Problems & solutions
A Collection Published as a Blog Is Unreadable
A Library With Three Ways In
Two Taxonomies That Have to Work Together
Filters That Narrow Together, Not Instead
Poetry Has No Commercial Hook
Built for the Second Poem
Readers Come for a Mood, Not a Date
Brian had two published collections, a Masters and nowhere to put the work. Poetry is not read chronologically, so the site is organised by form and theme rather than by publication date.
Results
A collection that reads like a collection
Work Brian adds himself
Range visible before commitment
Two printed collections became a library Brian maintains himself, with forty-five works and no developer in the loop. Many items and two ways to search them is a problem most content-heavy sites share.
Good to know
Should a poet or author use a blog or a filterable library for their work?
A library, in almost every case. A blog imposes publication date on a reader who does not care about it, and by the fortieth poem the earliest work is unreachable. Brian Berry's poems sit in one collection tagged by form and theme, so a reader arrives at the kind of poem they wanted rather than the most recent one.
Can a Webflow collection be filtered by two categories at the same time?
Yes, using Finsweet Attributes rather than Webflow’s native filtering. On this build, theme, poetic form and a live title search run as three independent fields on one collection list, and the selections narrow the results together instead of replacing each other. What Webflow still cannot do is cross-join two separate collections, which is a different problem with different workarounds.
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