The Great Year

Every Great Walk of New Zealand, in one year

A personal project. The Great Year was my own 2025 running challenge — every Great Walk of New Zealand, completed as ten single-day runs. The website is the storybook of how it went.

The brief was set by me, for me. I’d spent a year working through ten of New Zealand’s most iconic backcountry trails — 582 kilometres across alpine passes, rainforest, fjordland and tussock country. I wanted a site that did justice to the year: equal parts trip report, photo journal, and proof-of-concept for what a small, beautifully made personal website can be.

The approach

A single-page Spark-tier build, but with the stops pulled out. No CMS, no plugins — a lean static stack of HTML, CSS and a small amount of JavaScript for the interactive bits. The whole thing weighs in under a megabyte before media, scores 100/100 on Lighthouse, and runs entirely on Cloudflare’s edge. Exactly the kind of thing the Spark tier is capable of when there’s no constraint other than craft.

Design-wise the brief was straightforward: let the photography do the work. Dark mode by default, deep forest greens against off-white type, a serif display face for the headline (“The Great Year”) and a clean grotesque for the body. The hero is a slow Kodachrome-style slideshow of red huts, alpine ridges, river crossings — the photos that capture what the year actually looked like.

What I built

• Custom single-page architecture — lean HTML/CSS/JS, no framework, no build step. Deployed directly to Cloudflare via Wrangler.
• Hero slideshow with crossfade transitions and grain overlay, sequencing through the standout photos from each walk.
• Animated stat counters — 582 km, 10 Great Walks, 10 complete, 1 year — that count up as they enter the viewport.
• Per-walk modal galleries — each Great Walk has its own full-screen modal with date, distance, elevation, time, terrain, and a scrollable photo set. Keyboard-navigable (arrows + esc), with a progress counter.
• Story sections — “From the south”, “Twelve months”, and “All ten” — each one a chapter of the year, designed to reward a slow scroll.
• Interactive NZ map showing the location of each Great Walk, colour-coded by completion status.
• Photobook integration — link to a PDF photo book companion piece for visitors who want the long-form version.
• Performance budget: every image lazy-loaded, font-display: swap, no blocking JS. The first-page paint is fast even on rural 3G.

The outcome

A site that’s done what it was built to do: be a permanent record of the year, and a working showcase of what I can ship when I’m the client. It’s been used in conversations with prospective Pixelsmith clients as a “this is how far Spark can stretch” reference point — particularly for storytelling-led personal brands, founders’ sites, and one-off campaign pages.

What made this different

Two things. First, no client compromises — every design decision was mine to keep or kill, so the result is the cleanest expression of how I want the Spark tier to feel: spare, image-led, deliberate. Second, the brief had a deadline that didn’t move — the 2025 running year had to finish before the site could finish — which meant the build itself was tight, focused, and shipped to a self-imposed launch window.

If you’ve got a story worth telling on its own page, the Great Year is what that can look like.

Services

Strategy · Photography · Website Design & Development · Copywriting