The starting point: a well-made but rigid in-house framework
Vanessart.net is the website of VanessArt Studio, the workshop-gallery of Van'Ess: drawing and painting classes, workshops, and a pedagogy that combines art and English for young and old alike.
The old version of the site ran on a custom PHP framework. The original work was meticulous - nothing to discard on the design side - but it suffered from the classic flaw of isolated custom solutions: no ecosystem around it, no packages to mobilize, no community to handle maintenance. Every evolution, even modest, required everything to be written by hand. In the long run, this kind of foundation becomes more of a hindrance than an asset: it costs more to grow than to start over on proven bases.
Website High-performing and scalable websites — built with you, not for you.The Mermio approach: keep the identity, change the foundation
The challenge was not to start from scratch visually. VanessArt Studio has its own identity, a gallery of works, pages designed for its students and their parents. The mission: rebuild the site on Laravel while preserving this identity, all while laying truly scalable foundations.
1. A direct Laravel foundation, without an intermediate layer
Rather than staying on isolated custom solutions or going through a poorly tailored general CMS for a workshop-gallery, the choice was made to build directly on Laravel. This foundation brings what the in-house framework could not offer: a mature ecosystem, maintained packages, an active community, and a path of evolution that no longer relies on a single person who wrote the original code.
2. A back office designed for managing a workshop
The daily life of a workshop-gallery has its specificities: news, workshops, student works to publish, visuals to update, display order to adjust as exhibitions change. The new back office, built with Filament, fits this real use rather than offering a generic editor to configure each time.
3. SEO and GEO optimizations 2026
The redesign was an opportunity to align the site with current SEO standards:
consistent semantic structure and Hn markup on every page;
worked technical performance (loading times, page weight);
revised meta titles and meta descriptions for each page;
preparation for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): structuring content to be understood and cited by AI response engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude…), in addition to traditional search engines.
The goal: for VanessArt Studio to remain findable, whether the search is done on Google or via an AI assistant to whom one asks "a workshop to learn drawing while having fun with English".
What this change of foundation brings
Scalability: adding a feature no longer means writing it entirely by hand.
Maintenance: a documented and maintained framework, rather than code that only one person knows in detail.
Autonomy: a back office that fits the real uses of the workshop, without detours.
Visibility: a technical base ready for both classic SEO and generative search.
Thank you, Vanessa
A big thank you to Vanessa, founder of VanessArt Studio, for her trust throughout this project. It is this type of collaboration - where one first understands the business before touching the code - that allows Mermio to deliver lasting sites.
VanessArt vanessart.net VanessArt Studio: Courses for children, teens, and adults. Painting workshop in Annecy (74)A site that needs to evolve?
In-house framework showing its limits, general CMS become a hindrance, or simply a site that needs to evolve without breaking everything: this is exactly the type of project on which Mermio is comfortable.
