Miles Watson and Urban Eye
Two sister WordPress sites for a London artist and the public art charity he founded, rebuilt without a page builder and edited the same way as before.
An artist and his charity, rebuilt as one pair of sites
Miles Watson is a London painter. In 2000 he founded Urban Eye, a charity that works with residents, schools and youth clubs on murals, mosaics, bridges and architectural lighting in neglected parts of inner London. Urban Eye has produced more than 50 large public art projects, six of them award winners.
Both sites, mileswatson.com and urbaneye.org.uk, ran on the Bridge theme with the WPBakery page builder. EG rebuilt them as two custom WordPress themes on one shared codebase, kept the look Miles had chosen, and moved every project, picture and document across: 15 Urban Eye projects and 42 of Miles’s artworks.
The brief.
Miles agreed to the rebuild on one condition: editing had to work the way it always had. He also wanted to keep the slow zoom on the project pictures, the effect he had chosen Bridge for. The old sites were heavy. Urban Eye loaded 94 extra files on every page, Miles Watson about 3.5MB of theme code, and gallery pictures were around 700KB each. Both were running old versions of WordPress and PHP.
What we delivered.
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Two custom WordPress themes
One shared codebase replacing Bridge and WPBakery.
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Website rebuild and migration
Every page, project, picture and press document moved across.
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Gallery editing
A drag-and-drop Gallery box on each project, as in the old theme.
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Image optimisation
Automatic resizing and WebP on upload, with a warning for pictures that are too small.
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SEO and redirects
Redirects from every old address, new titles and descriptions, image listings and schema.
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Accessibility
Built to WCAG 2.2 AA: stronger contrast, underlined links and a gallery that works by keyboard.
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Security hardening
Login protection, hidden usernames and an email alert if a new admin, plugin or theme appears.
How we approached it.
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The same look and the same editing
Projects are still edited with a title, text, cover picture, category and a Gallery box where pictures are dragged into order. Pages use the WordPress editor, limited to the few blocks they need, and the logo, social links, footer credit and map sit on one settings page. The slow hover zoom matches Bridge's exactly.
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One codebase for two sites
Both themes share the same code. Only the colours, fonts and settings differ, so a fix made for one site goes straight to the other and future changes stay quick.
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Pictures a tenth of the size
Uploads are resized and converted to WebP automatically, from about 700KB to about 70KB a picture without looking worse, and only the sizes the design uses are made. Each page now loads one small style file and one small script.
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Old addresses kept working
Every old address forwards to its new page, titles and descriptions were rewritten, every picture has a description, and all the artwork is listed for Google Images. Schema tells Google that Miles is the artist behind Urban Eye, which connects the two sites.
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Reviewed on staging, then launched
Miles checked both sites on a staging copy before anything changed. Urban Eye went live first and mileswatson.com followed the same day, 21 October 2026, with full backups of the old sites kept.
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