Filecoin Foundation

Context

Filecoin Foundation stewards the growth of the Filecoin network, a decentralized storage protocol. Their flagship site, fil.org, was still running on Webflow, which had become a bottleneck for performance and for the amount of content the team needed to publish and maintain. I was hired in April 2024 to lead a full revamp of the site, moving it off Webflow onto a codebase the team could actually own and iterate on.

Contribution

I worked across the stack, rebuilding the site on Next.js and owning both the frontend architecture and a chunk of the backend work, now open source. Beyond the migration itself, I also automated a number of internal processes that used to be manual, freeing up time for the team to focus on content and ecosystem work rather than site upkeep.

A good part of my time also went into UX work that had nothing to do with the site itself: dogfooding projects across the Filecoin ecosystem and writing up UX reports to help those teams improve the usability of their own products. The findings from those sessions are published here. It gave me a much broader view of the network than a typical "rebuild the marketing site" contract would have.

Challenges

Migrating off a no-code tool like Webflow always comes with the same tension: content editors are used to a certain flexibility, and a custom codebase has to replicate or replace that without slowing the team down. Getting the content model and authoring workflow right, so non-technical teammates could keep publishing without needing a PR for every change, took real iteration.

The ecosystem dogfooding and UX reporting work was rewarding but open-ended by nature, there was no clear finish line, and I had to balance it against the more concrete deadlines of the site rebuild itself.

Results

The rebuild paid off: traffic to fil.org roughly doubled, and every performance metric we tracked improved. The site is live today at fil.org, running on the stack we built together.