I’m delighted to share that gabrielhemery.com has been completely rebuilt, and the new site is now live.
This has been a project a long time in the making. I first published this website back in 2010, and over the years it has grown to hold a great deal: books, photography, articles on trees and forests, news, and the shop. It had reached the point where all that material deserved a home that could do it justice, so I set about rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.
What’s new
The site now runs on a much faster foundation. Pages that used to take a moment to load now appear almost instantly, even the ones drawing on the largest parts of the site’s content. Whether you’re browsing the Knowledge Base, searching through species and topics, or heading straight to the shop, the experience should feel noticeably quicker and smoother.
The centrepiece of this rebuild is an entirely new Knowledge Base. It now holds over 280 tree species profiles, more than 80 tree and forestry topics, and over 1,000 forest sites across Britain, all searchable and properly connected to one another. Behind that speed is a database built to hold a genuinely large and growing body of work, structured so that everything connects properly. Browse an article on a particular tree species, for instance, and you’ll now find related books and topics linked alongside it, rather than left to search for them separately.
A few things to explore on the new site:
- An entirely new Knowledge Base, with 280+ species, 80+ topics, and 1,000+ forest sites
- A cleaner Books section, with related reading connected to each title
- A refreshed Photography area
- A smoother shop, for anyone wanting a personally signed book or print
- The latest News, kept properly up to date
Why it matters
None of this changes what the site is for; it’s still simply a place to bring together my writing, my photography, and my work on trees and forests in one spot. Now the site does that properly, quickly, and in a way that will keep working well as more is added over time. It also works seamlessly on mobile devices too.
Do you like the new gabrielhemery.com website?
I hope you enjoy exploring it. As ever, do get in touch if you have thoughts, or spot anything that doesn’t look quite right yet. This is very much a living site, and it will keep evolving, and the Knowledge Base especially so. If there’s a species or topic you’d like to see featured, I’d love to hear about it.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
For those curious about the technical side: the new site is built on Astro, a super-fast, open-source framework particularly well-suited to content-heavy websites like this one. It combines a lightning-quick, statically generated front end with a more powerful content database behind it, allowing thousands of pages to load quickly while still supporting a full shop and regular content updates.
