Reviewer.ly Website Redesign

Their existing site could not explain what they built to someone who had never heard of them.

Reviewer.ly is a University of Toronto backed AI platform that helps journals and publishers find qualified peer reviewers for manuscripts, patents, and funding applications using deep learning. Their existing site was built on WordPress using the block editor and had not kept pace with the product. Significant responsiveness issues across devices, too many pages with stale content, and a visual identity that no longer matched the credibility of the platform. First time visitors could not quickly understand what Reviewer.ly did or why it was worth their attention. The site was actively working against the sales process.

Auditing before designing

I started in Figma. Before designing anything I audited the existing site to understand what content was load bearing and what could be cut. Most of the dead pages could be collapsed into a leaner structure without losing anything meaningful. The new information architecture put the product front and centre on the landing page. I brought initial concepts to the first of what became weekly progress reviews with the full team — around twelve people covering product, research, and leadership simultaneously. That cadence shaped the entire project. Nothing sat untested for long.

A technology constraint that became a design problem

When the Figma direction was approved and it came time to build, I proposed rebuilding the site in Next.js with React. I had strong familiarity with that stack, it would have given the site better performance and a cleaner architecture, and it was the right technical choice. The team pushed back. Their concern was practical and reasonable: they needed to update content themselves after handoff and the team was comfortable with WordPress. Moving to a custom React frontend would have taken that control away entirely. I had no prior experience building for WordPress, so the solution I arrived at was to use Vite to build a custom WordPress theme. I could write the frontend in the environment I knew, compile it as a theme, and have WordPress load and display it. I used Codex to fill gaps in my WordPress knowledge throughout the build.

The accordion took more iterations than any other component

The most iterated component on the project was a section on the landing page walking potential clients through the full product suite. Reviewer.ly had multiple distinct offerings and a flat list of features was not communicating the depth or differentiation of each one. Through several rounds of weekly feedback I developed an accordion style container where each product could be expanded in place, with a live demo component tied to whichever product was currently selected directly underneath. Visitors could move from reading about a product to interacting with it in a single flow without navigating away. Getting the copy right took as long as getting the interaction right — the weekly reviews consistently surfaced moments where descriptions were either too technical or too vague.

A fully custom WordPress theme built with Vite, replacing the existing block editor site entirely. A streamlined information architecture that cut dead pages and reoriented the site around the product and its value to publishers and journals. A landing page built around an accordion walking visitors through the full product suite with a contextual demo component under each product. Responsive across devices with a visual identity consistent with the platform's academic and institutional audience. An important constraint worth naming: restricted domain access meant no access to hosting configuration settings, which closed off cleaner solutions like using Astro for the theme. Working within that limit was part of the job.