Built in two phases: a Framer portfolio and CMS setup, followed by a technical SEO round to make the site easier to find for international producers.

Manolis is a French-Greek production sound mixer and location sound recordist based in Athens with over 15 years of experience on international productions — documentaries, commercials, TV shows and fiction films across Europe, North America and North Africa. Credits include work for Al Jazeera, ARTE, Channel 4, Radio-Canada, and branded productions for Adidas, Tudor, Lamborghini and Zara, among others.

He needed a portfolio site built around a specific goal: ranking when foreign producers and directors search for a local sound person in Greece. Not a creative showreel. A professional service site that answers practical questions for someone planning a shoot in a country they've never worked in before.

He came with a template already chosen (Eizo on Framer), a document with 35+ fully written project pages, and clear ideas about positioning. My job was to take that material and build something that actually works — technically, editorially and in search.

Attract international productions shooting in Greece. The primary audience is foreign producers, directors and production coordinators who need a reliable local sound contact. The site had to speak directly to that person — not just list credits, but answer the questions they'd actually have before reaching out.

Rank for the right searches. Terms like "production sound mixer Greece", "location sound recordist Athens" and variations of both are what someone types when they're looking for exactly what Manolis offers. SEO was built into the structure of the site from the start, not added at the end.

Handle a diverse portfolio cleanly. 40+ projects across 8-9 distinct categories meant the CMS needed to be flexible enough to display different credit structures per project without creating a maintenance nightmare.

Get the technical setup right. Clean domain connection, no leftover template content showing in search results, project pages actually indexed by Google.

This was the most interesting design problem on the project. Manolis's portfolio spans genuinely different production contexts, and the credits change depending on the type of work.

A documentary credits a Director. A commercial credits a Client. A TV show credits a Host. A fiction film has a theatrical Release. A branded production might have a named Talent (David Beckham appeared in one case). A documentary has a Broadcaster.

The template came with one Projects collection and a fixed set of fields. The question was whether to build separate CMS collections per category (documentary, commercial, fiction, etc.) or solve it within one.

Separate collections would mean separate design templates, separate page layouts, and no clean way to show all projects together with a single filter. One unified collection was the right call — but it meant adding all the variant fields and setting each one to hide when empty in the design. In Framer this works through visibility conditions on the layer: if the field is blank, the row collapses. For that to work without leaving ghost spacing, the parent frame has to use Auto Layout.

Six fields needed conditional show/hide treatment: Director, Client, Host, Broadcaster, Talent and Release. Two fields were missing from the template entirely and had to be added: Director (used across documentaries, short films and fiction) and Role (which alternates between Location Sound Recordist and Production Sound Mixer depending on the project).

Several of the client's Vimeo links embedded fine and others didn't render at all. The issue wasn't Framer — it was Vimeo's domain embedding restrictions. Most of these videos belong to the production companies, not to Manolis, so he has no control over the embed permissions. The workaround was to use the Preview Image field as a fallback for non-embeddable videos, with the thumbnail clicking through to Vimeo directly. The template already had both fields in the CMS, which made this straightforward to implement.

The client had written his own meta titles and descriptions, which showed real thought about keywords. But the titles were running 75-80 characters (Google truncates around 60), the descriptions were 170-175 characters (the safe limit is around 155), and the framing leaned toward describing who he is rather than speaking to what an international producer is looking for.

Rewrote title tags and meta descriptions for all five page types — home, info, projects, contact and the CMS project template — tightening the character counts and reframing the copy around availability and international shoots rather than biography.

For the individual project pages, pulling the Overview field directly as the meta description would have resulted in most entries being truncated. The cleaner solution was to add a dedicated short Meta Description field to the CMS collection and fill it per project.

The homepage FAQ section was built out to cover location-specific search terms (Athens, Crete, Mykonos, Santorini, Thessaloniki, the Peloponnese) and role-term variations (sound recordist, sound mixer, sound engineer, sound person). That kind of targeted FAQ content compounds over time in search.

Three things from the Eizo template were still in place and would have gone live if not caught:

The template's own meta title and description were showing on every page — "Eizo - Videography Portfolio Framer Template" and a description calling it a template for filmmakers. This would have appeared in Google search results.

The CMS collection pages (individual project pages) had a noindex tag set in Framer's SEO settings, meaning Google would not have indexed a single portfolio page.

The site name in Framer's general settings was still "Eizo", which was appending to every project page title.

The site launched at soundingreece.com with a clean CMS handling 40+ projects across multiple categories from a single collection, conditional credit fields that adapt to each project type without any visible empty space, and a fallback system for videos that can't be embedded.

On the SEO side: title tags and meta descriptions are within spec across all pages, project pages are indexed, template content has been fully replaced, and the site name is correct throughout. The FAQ section and location-specific copy across the homepage and info page give the site a solid baseline for the searches that matter to the client.

The contact page includes a WhatsApp link with a pre-filled message for time-sensitive production enquiries — a small detail that makes a real difference when someone's trying to crew up quickly for a shoot.

The domain itself — soundingreece.com — turned out to be a good asset. The keywords are right there in the URL.

A few months after launch, the client came back with an AI-generated audit listing ten possible issues. I reviewed each one, separated what actually affected discoverability from what didn’t, and proposed a focused package instead of fixing everything on the list.

Heading structure: one clear H1 per page and a consistent H2/H3 hierarchy across breakpoints

Crawlable portfolio: removed pagination so search engines can reach all 39 projects through regular links

Duplicate pages: set a single primary portfolio page and removed the alternate list view from search

Metadata: new titles and descriptions for every page, and a CMS-driven template so new projects get them automatically

Structured data: Person and WebSite schema with his roles, location, languages and IMDb, LinkedIn, Vimeo and Crew United profiles

Redirects: verified all 15 redirects from old project URLs with special characters

Search Console: diagnosed the reported 404, resubmitted the sitemap and requested reindexing

Privacy: a GDPR privacy policy, plus a cookie check confirming the site needs no cookie banner

I also wrote a maintenance guide so he can add projects and manage URLs and Search Console on his own.