We're thrilled to welcome Dr. Hannah Lee Riskas as the latest member of the Echo Studios family. Hannah is an ecologist, ant researcher, and artist — a genuinely unique combination that demanded an equally unique digital presence. She needed a site that could house her academic publications, her scientific illustrations, and a functioning e-commerce shop — all managed without touching code.

The challenge wasn't just design — it was architecture. Hannah needed to update content regularly across multiple domains: publications, reading lists, visitor postcards, and shop inventory. A traditional CMS would have been overkill. A static site would have been too rigid. We needed something in between.

What We're Building Together

We're building a full-stack portfolio and headless e-commerce site through Echo Site. The scope includes:

• A Next.js site with Notion as a headless CMS — 5 synced databases powering publications, reading lists, and visitor postcards
• Shopify's Storefront API for a fully integrated illustration shop
• A prebuild script that syncs Notion cover images (which expire hourly) into the repo at build time
• React Query and Zustand for state management
• An interactive visitor postcard system

Everything is editable from Notion databases — no frontend changes needed. Hannah can update her publications, add to her reading list, or manage her shop inventory all from the same tool she already uses for her research.

More updates to follow as the build progresses.