projects · 27 August 2026
Rebuilding the Pinnacle Hill Observatory Website
I replaced the old Pinnacle Hill Observatory WordPress site with a faster, self-contained field journal that gives the images and the observatory build room to breathe.
Pinnacle Hill Observatory had been running on WordPress for years. It held the observatory story, build photographs, equipment notes, astrophotography and the occasional field update, but the presentation had started to feel more like an archive than a visit to the observatory.
I’ve now rebuilt the whole site as a modern, self-contained field journal. The address is still pinnaclehillobs.co.nz , and the important material is still there, but the experience is completely different. It’s darker, quieter and much more visual—which seems appropriate for a website about spending long nights collecting faint light from very far away.
Preserving the story, not the platform
The main rule for the rebuild was that WordPress wasn’t the valuable part. The images, the observatory build and the notes were.
I migrated the useful content and media into the new project, then rebuilt the structure around the things people actually come to see. There’s now a proper image archive for the astrophotography, a complete equipment reference, an observatory section, a journal with permanent article links and a contact page.
The virtual tour remains on YouTube, but it only loads when someone asks for it. Everything else needed for the normal site experience is served locally, so I’m no longer depending on WordPress—or a collection of third-party embeds—to assemble a page.
The replacement also gives each part of the site a clear, permanent home. The build journey, image archive, equipment reference and individual journal entries all have their own routes rather than being buried in a general page or media library.
Turning the build into a journey
One of my favourite parts of the old material was a 20-page presentation showing the observatory being built. It had the whole progression: the Bombay Hills site, foundations, timber framing, walls, roof and the finished working space.
I didn’t want to reduce that to a tiny embedded slideshow. Each page is now stored locally as an optimised WebP image and arranged as a meandering visual journey through the build. The layout alternates scale and position as you move down the page, so it feels more like following the project as it rises from the ground than clicking “next” twenty times in a presentation viewer.
It’s a fairly simple change in technical terms, but it gives the photographs room to do their job. Observatory builds are full of odd decisions that make much more sense when you can see the structure taking shape.
Building around the images
The new frontend uses React, Vite and Tailwind CSS, with a subtle Three.js star field behind the opening sections. The star field responds gently to pointer movement, but it stops animating when the visitor has reduced-motion enabled. The pages are loaded separately as they’re needed, and the fonts are hosted with the site rather than fetched from somewhere else.
I deliberately avoided turning it into a generic technology-company website. The visual language comes from the subject: deep blue-black backgrounds, instrument-like labels, restrained cyan and warm highlights, and large areas where the astrophotography can speak for itself.
The home page introduces the observatory and its equipment without trying to show everything at once. From there, the image archive covers nebulae, galaxies, planets and the Moon; the equipment section goes from the concrete pier and mount through to cameras, focusers and dew control; and the journal preserves the longer notes behind the images and upgrades.
The less glamorous parts still matter
A static-looking site can still have moving pieces. The contact form needed to work without putting email credentials into the browser, so it talks to a small private service behind the web server. That service validates the message, limits request size and frequency, includes a honeypot for basic bot traffic, and hands valid mail to a transactional delivery service.
Deployment follows the same cautious pattern. A release is built and checked in a separate UAT environment first, then the exact tested revision is promoted to production. That made the final WordPress retirement much less dramatic: verify the new routes, images, contact delivery and health checks, then switch over knowing the tested build was the one going live.
What I took from it
The biggest lesson was that rebuilding an old site doesn’t have to mean starting its story again. The valuable bits were already there. The job was to separate them from the platform, organise them properly and give them a presentation that felt like Pinnacle Hill Observatory.
It’s also a useful reminder that “static” doesn’t have to mean lifeless. A small amount of movement, careful typography and the right image treatment can create atmosphere without burying the content under effects. The clever part is knowing when to stop—which is probably true of both web design and astrophotography processing.
The new site is live now, with no WordPress dependency in the public path and plenty of room for new images and field notes as the observatory keeps doing what it was built to do.
Kirk out.