A Website for a Handmade Briar Pipe Maker

A three-week redesign that moved a handmade briar pipe maker from a dated Joomla site to a custom WordPress showcase, and turned a quiet website into a real way for collectors to find his work.

Designer, Developer
& Project Manager

Joomla to WordPress
migration & redesign

Michał Pawlak has been carving handmade briar pipes for more than a dozen years. Every pipe is one of a kind — shaped, sanded, and finished individually, the kind of object collectors notice the moment they pick it up. His website was the opposite of that. Built on an old Joomla install, it looked dated, had no clear structure, and gave a serious collector no real way in.

This is the situation a lot of artisans end up in. The product is exceptional. The website is a placeholder. For a handmade maker, the site has a specific job to do — show what is available right now, tell the story of the work and the workshop, and make it easy for a buyer to reach out about a specific pipe. Michał's old site did none of those things. The photography sat next to outdated layouts, the navigation hid the pipes instead of presenting them, and almost no organic search traffic was finding him.

He needed a website that finally matched what came off his bench — and a real foundation underneath it so the right people would actually find his work.

For an artisan, the worst thing a website can do is compete with the product. The whole approach here was to strip away anything that would get between the visitor and the pipes, and then put a real system underneath so Michał could keep updating it without me in the loop every week.

The redesigned website for a handmade pipe maker, homepage, the catalog of available pipes, and a look back at where it started.

The results showed up almost immediately after launch. Organic search traffic climbed once Google indexed the new structure. Visitors stayed longer and moved deeper into the site. And — the part that actually matters to a working craftsman — inquiries about pipes jumped sharply compared to the old website. The pipes had not changed. What changed was that the website finally let serious collectors see them properly and act on it.

The bigger lesson sits underneath the numbers. For an artisan, every potential buyer is forming an impression of the work before they ever hold it — and the website is doing most of that work, whether you have designed it to or not. The three-week timeline showed that a focused redesign with clear goals beats years of patching an outdated system. Sometimes the right move is to strip everything back and rebuild around the thing you are actually showing.

If you are a maker, artisan, or small craftsperson and your website has stopped doing your work justice, the approach here works across most categories: a quiet design that gets out of the way, a structure that helps people see what you have, and SEO foundations that pull the right visitors in. You can read more about how I work, see the rest of the portfolio, or read on the blog about why most artisan websites underperform.