The Rooted Wisdom — Design, Build, and Content Strategy for a Living Herbal School
Role: Designer, Developer, Content Strategist
2011-Siteworx
Education Platform
AI-Assisted Build
The Rooted Wisdom is a living herbal school rooted in spirit, ancestors, and earth — offering community membership, foundational courses, and a year-long apprenticeship program. As its founder, I wore every hat: designer, developer, content strategist, and the client whose vision had to be realized. Building the business's digital home meant making decisions with full creative authority — and full accountability for getting it right.
This project is also a proof of concept for a new way of working: using Claude as a collaborative build partner to move from concept to living site significantly faster than a traditional process would allow.
The challenge
Most of my career has been spent designing for large organizations — federal agencies, healthcare institutions, enterprise platforms — where every decision moves through layers of stakeholders, approvals, and competing priorities. The Rooted Wisdom was the opposite of all that. The creative brief was mine. The voice was mine. The decisions were mine.
The challenge wasn't organizational — it was focus. With total creative authority and a real business to launch, the work required a different kind of discipline: knowing exactly what the site needed to be, building a clear system to get there, and not letting the freedom become sprawl.
Process — a human-to-AI collaborative workflow
1
Voice & tone foundation
Before any design work began, I developed a detailed voice and tone guide and gave it to Claude as a working document. Every piece of content — page copy, navigation labels, course descriptions — was written within that frame.
2
Home page concept iteration
Working from the published site as a reference point, I iterated through home page concepts with Claude until the layout, hierarchy, and content structure felt right. The home page became the design reference for everything that followed.
3
Style guide from design
Once the home page was finalized, we extracted a style guide directly from it — typography, spacing, component patterns, color decisions. The design led the system, not the other way around.
4
11ty build environment
I set up a local 11ty site with an Obsidian vault for content management. 11ty was given access only to the Obsidian "publish" folder — a deliberate content boundary that kept drafts separate from the live build. I also added Obsidian plugins to preview rendered HTML directly inside the vault.
5
Site chrome, then pages
We built the site chrome first — Nunjucks templates and shared markdown components — then moved page by page: design a page, create the markdown file in the publish folder, review in the browser, iterate. When a page was ready, it was pushed to GitHub, triggering an automatic deploy to Netlify. A repeatable loop for every surface.
6
Deployment — GitHub & Netlify
The site is hosted on Netlify, connected directly to the GitHub repository. Every push to the main branch triggers an automatic build and deploy — no manual upload, no FTP, no separate deployment step. The result is a CI/CD workflow that keeps the live site in sync with the repository at all times, and makes publishing new content as simple as moving a file from draft to publish and pushing.
7
Retrospective and process improvement
After the initial build, I ran a retrospective with Claude — a human-to-AI review of what worked and what could improve. One outcome: a plan to write files directly to a draft folder and iterate there before publishing, tightening the feedback loop for future pages.
11ty
Nunjucks
Markdown
Obsidian
Claude
HTML/CSS
Github & Netlify
Obsidian was the right tool for this work for a specific reason: it thinks the way this content needs to grow. The Rooted Wisdom is a school built on interconnected knowledge — plants relate to traditions, traditions connect to seasonal practices, practices link back to specific courses. Obsidian's linked, non-linear structure mirrors that web of relationships naturally. Content can be written, tagged, and connected the way the knowledge actually lives — not flattened into a folder hierarchy or forced into a CMS that assumes a blog. The publish folder boundary meant that only what was ready went live, while everything else could develop at its own pace in the vault. More importantly, content changes and new pages could be pushed from right inside Obsidian with out having to open up the development environment.
Design decisions
Serving as my own client meant I could make decisions from instinct and conviction rather than consensus. The three-tier learning path — Community, Foundations, Apprenticeship — emerged from understanding how people actually arrive at this kind of work. Not everyone is ready for a year-long commitment. The site needed to meet students at whatever door they were standing in front of.
The navigation reflects that same thinking. Seven destinations, each purposeful: Learn, Workshops, Retreats, Zine, Consultations, About. No filler, no dead ends. The content model was designed to grow seasonally — new monographs, ceremony invitations, plant notes — without requiring a redesign every time the business adds something new.
The voice and tone guide did double duty — it shaped the site's content and gave Claude a stable creative frame to work within. When the AI knows who you are and how you speak, the collaboration gets significantly faster and the output requires far less correction.
What this project demonstrates
The Rooted Wisdom is a demonstration of what's possible when deep UX experience meets AI-assisted development. The site went from concept to live significantly faster than a traditional solo build — days instead of months — without sacrificing design quality, content depth, or the specificity of voice that makes the school feel like itself.
It's also a model I can bring to client work. The workflow — voice and tone first, design system from design, structured content pipeline, iterative page-by-page build — is repeatable. The tools change. The discipline doesn't.
take a peak @