Revamping Michael Pollan’s digital presence

For acclaimed author Michael Pollan, his website serves as a comprehensive hub for his extensive body of work. Recently, our Special Projects Team at Automattic updated Michael’s WordPress site, transforming it into a well-organized and beautiful resource.

As most client work goes, it started with a tight deadline. Michael needed his site updated for his upcoming film, Food, Inc. 2, which he knew would generate a lot of traffic to his site.

The task — refresh the site’s design, clean up his content, and do it all ahead of the film’s launch.

A prolific portfolio

Updating the site was challenging due to the breadth and variety of content that needed to be organized. Michael’s site is a complete archive of his work, including:

• 10 books (seven of which have been New York Times bestsellers!).
• Over 100 written articles dating back to 1988 for publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.
• Six films.
• Resources, class material, and other helpful information on health and nutrition.
• Many interviews and reviews of his work.

Our plan for a site overhaul

Michael’s old WordPress site was still functional. However, it was built on an older, classic theme. This theme lacked modern capabilities, like those offered by the block editor. By upgrading his site to a block theme, we could remove excessive plugins and bloated code, allowing the site to fully leverage the latest WordPress features.

Our team’s approach to updating the site focused on these key areas:

• Content organization: We reorganized the site to showcase Michael’s work more clearly and make it easier for visitors to navigate.
• Adding block editor capabilities: By upgrading to a modern WordPress theme with block editor support, we enabled easier content creation and layout design.
• Promoting new work: We created a space on the homepage for Michael to promote new work. We used the block editor so it’s easy to update in the future.

Content, content, content

With so much diverse content, we knew we needed to spend a lot of time thinking about navigation and structure. This was the most challenging part of the design process, but the most important to get right.

We organized his work into Books, Films, and Articles. Using custom post types for each made it simple to manage.

We made most of these pages using off-the-shelf WordPress blocks in the site editor. Each book’s information (title, cover, description, reviews, etc.) is connected to neatly organized data on the backend.

Each book page has links to Reviews and Interviews, each with their own archive page:

Epilogue

We launched Michael’s redesigned site to coincide with the April 4th premiere of Food, Inc. 2, providing visitors a compelling archive of his award-winning work. Through strategic use of modern WordPress features and clean design principles, we delivered an engaging user experience on a tight timeline.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Food, Inc. 2 trailer and stream the film!