Split Lip Adventures is live
Split Lip Adventures is up: the new home of firefighter and world-record adventurer Scott Butler, rebuilt from a 2007-era site builder into a fast Next.js site on Cloudflare. And a note on how this kind of work is becoming my bread and butter.
Another one is live. Split Lip Adventures is the new online home of Scott Butler, and it went up this week. Scott is a firefighter who, in his spare time, takes on the kind of expeditions most of us only watch documentaries about. He was the first person to row across the Black Sea, he has bikepacked through Uganda, and he does a good deal of it raising money for charity.
His stories had been living on a slow, fixed-width page built on a 2007-era website builder. It loaded slowly, looked dated, and did no justice at all to the adventures behind it. So I rebuilt it from scratch. Drag the handle below to see the difference.
BeforeAfter
What I built
A Next.js site served from Cloudflare Workers: dark, editorial, and built around Scott’s photography rather than fighting it. Adventures, a blog, books, interviews and a speaking page, all managed in Sanity so Scott can add the next chapter himself without ever touching code or calling me.
My favourite part is the adventure map: an interactive 3D globe with 153 of Scott’s photos pinned where they were taken, clustered by expedition. Spin it, pick a cluster, and browse the gallery filtered by country. If you want the full breakdown, the case study is here.
Something I’m getting good at
What struck me most this time is how routine it has started to feel, in the best way. Build it in Next.js, migrate years of content off whatever dated platform it was trapped on, wire it to a CMS, and hand it over. The only genuinely new thing each time is the client’s existing setup: which provider they’re on, how their DNS is wired, and what has to move without the site going dark for a second. Everything else is a path I’ve walked before, which is exactly why it now comes together quickly and cleanly.
And it earns its keep. Scott wanted somewhere to promote his public speaking, a way to show people where he’s been, and out from under a web provider that had quietly become expensive. He got all three: a custom site built around how he actually works, room to grow as the expeditions do, and a hosting bill a fraction of what he was paying before. Another success, and another one I’m proud of.
Now go and spin the globe. I’ll wait.