Overview

Lady Kings of Texas is an independent feature from a team of women filmmakers with credits spanning Cannes, Sundance, Netflix, and Marvel, directed by Sundance alum Erin Brown Thomas, who won a 2026 Academy Award for her producing credit on a short film. Individually they had the résumés; together they had not yet written, directed, and produced a feature. With most of the film shot, they needed a website that could raise the remaining funding, work as a promotional tool on the festival circuit, and finally be theirs to own and edit. I designed and built a seven page site in Webflow in a six week sprint, migrating them off Squarespace and handing them full control of their own marketing data.

Role: Designer and builder (design, build, SEO, structured data, migration)
Timeline: Six week sprint
Scope: Seven page site, hosting migration, analytics and Search Console setup, schema.org markup, llms.txt
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Webflow, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, schema.org

The Problem

The team had a Squarespace site one of the producers had built, and it wasn't working for them on several fronts.

They didn't have access to their own analytics, because the account was routed through a previous marketing agency. They didn't have SEO, so the film wasn't surfacing correctly in search. They needed the film to appear as a film when people searched it, with Google's Knowledge Graph attributing the right IMDb credits to the right cast and crew instead of guessing. They needed to make changes and publish themselves, without a developer or an agency in the loop. And they needed a fast, custom site with a reel, because the real use case was someone pulling it up on their phone at a festival like SXSW, thirty seconds after meeting one of the filmmakers.

Underneath all of it: the site had a job to do. The film needed funding for the final 20%, collected through the film collective's nonprofit, which meant the site had to convert a stranger into a donor.

Discovery and Planning

We started with a planning session mapping out, in sticky notes, exactly what content each page needed. That artifact drove everything downstream: I designed the site in Figma against those sections, and the client delivered all copy in a Google Doc structured to match the same sticky notes. I placed their real copy into the Figma designs so the whole team could confirm we had everything and agreed on it before a single thing was built.

The sequence matters. Designing against real copy instead of placeholder text is what kept a six week timeline from becoming a twelve week one.

Design

The film is set in a near-present-future Texas that has seceded from the United States and declared childless women over the age of 35 "redundant" and fair game to kill. It's a Thelma and Louise style buddy comedy crossed with The Handmaid's Tale, following four women running for the border together. The site had to carry that tone, funny and furious at once, while still functioning as a fundraising and press tool.

The seven pages cover a film synopsis, a full cast and crew overview with their links and logos, a thirty second teaser reel, a stills gallery, and a behind the scenes page. The teaser loops on the homepage so there's always motion pulling the visitor in. Small interactions like button hovers give the site life without slowing it down.

Build

I built the site in Webflow specifically for what happens after launch. Webflow's Editor lets the client change text and swap images on their own without any ability to break the layout, which is exactly the balance a filmmaking team needs: full autonomy over content, zero risk to the design. I migrated hosting off Squarespace as part of the build.

SEO, Structured Data, and the Knowledge Graph

Getting a film to register as a film in Google means feeding the Knowledge Graph something to work with, and the Knowledge Graph only builds once enough sources point back to the original site. So I laid the groundwork with schema.org markup covering press mentions, IMDb links for every cast and crew member, and the donation link, so search engines can attribute the right credits to the right people rather than inferring them.

I connected Google Analytics and Google Search Console and made sure the team, not an agency, receives the emails. They own their marketing data now.

Every image got an SEO-friendly filename and alt text, which does double duty: accessibility for screen readers, and legibility for crawlers and answer engines.

Answer Engine and Generative Engine Optimization

I added an llms.txt file so the site follows current best practices for AEO and GEO, not just traditional SEO. As people increasingly find films by asking Claude or ChatGPT instead of typing into a search bar, Lady Kings of Texas is structured to be found there too.

One important constraint: the clients are professional writers, and it mattered enormously to them that no content on the site was written or produced by AI. The site is optimized to be found by LLMs while being entirely human-written. Those two things are not in conflict, and treating them as if they were is how a lot of sites get this wrong.

Performance and Accessibility

Every image was optimized for size and loads on page load, because the actual scenario is someone standing in a festival hallway on cell service deciding whether this film is worth their attention. Alt text throughout serves both screen reader users and machine readers.

What Shipped

• A seven page custom site, live and migrated off Squarespace, in six weeks
• Client-editable content with a locked layout, no developer required
• Analytics and Search Console owned by the filmmakers themselves
• Schema.org markup laying the foundation for correct Knowledge Graph attribution
• A donation path connected to the film collective's nonprofit
• Structured data and llms.txt positioning the film for both search engines and answer engines

This was one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on,,, which is not a metric, but it shows.

‍

‍