A New Digital Stage for Minh Tran & Company

Background

Minh Tran is a choreographer, retired professor, and company director whose existing website no longer reflected the contemporary nature of his dance theater work. The previous site was also not fully responsive and was oriented more toward his academic career.

The goal was to create a new digital home for Minh Tran & Company that felt visually compelling and artistically representative of the work, while still preserving information about Minh’s academic background and teaching experience.

Challenge

The project came with an unusual technical constraint: Minh was already committed to using Porkbun’s native website builder and CMS because of an established relationship with the small hosting company.

Rather than moving the site to a platform I already knew, I committed to learning the CMS and finding ways to work within its limitations. Like many website builders, the platform relies on pre-built components that make editing easier but can restrict more custom design.

The challenge was to create a distinctive, image-forward design while keeping the site easy for Minh to edit himself.

Results

The redesigned website is a significant visual and functional upgrade, with a more contemporary presentation that puts the company’s dance work front and center.

The homepage features a full-screen photo slider that immediately establishes the visual language of the company. The repertoire page uses tabs to organize different productions, making a substantial body of work easier to explore.

The result balances two sides of Minh’s professional identity: the visual and artistic world of his dance theater work and his career as a professor and educator.

Strategy

The primary shift in strategy was moving the website's emphasis away from an academic-first presentation and toward Minh’s work as a choreographer and company director.

The site needed to speak particularly well to foundation and grant panelists, while still making Minh’s academic background easy to find for opportunities such as guest teaching.

The existing hosting and CMS platform was also an important part of the strategy. Rather than changing platforms, I learned Porkbun’s native website builder and worked within its system to create the desired experience.

Design

The visual direction was intentionally artistic and image-forward, reflecting the nature of Minh Tran & Company’s work.

A full-screen photo slider became the centerpiece of the homepage, allowing dance photography to establish the tone of the site immediately.

For the repertoire section, I used tabbed navigation to give individual productions their own space without requiring visitors to navigate through a long series of separate pages.

Development

Building the site within Porkbun’s native website builder required a different development approach than a typical custom website project. I worked with the platform’s pre-built components while using a minimal amount of custom code where necessary to achieve the design.

This required finding a balance between customization and the CMS’s editing capabilities. The goal was not simply to reproduce a custom design, but to create something Minh could continue to maintain and update himself after launch.

The final site is responsive across screen sizes and provides a more contemporary, visually engaging home for Minh Tran & Company.