In collaboration with Monsoon Design, I led the web design and WordPress development for Weka Biosciences, a Santa Fe biotech startup developing tailored enzymes and breakthrough biopolymers for next-generation biomaterials.
Weka Biosciences is a small, nimble biotech team working at the edge of its field — producing tailored enzymes and two breakthrough polymers, Testan™ and Nextan™, engineered for chiral separations and related high-performance applications. Named after the spirited New Zealand bird known for bold curiosity, the company needed a public-facing website that could match the ambition of the science behind it.
The central challenge was tone. Biotech sites tend to swing between over-explained jargon and corporate stock imagery that makes every company look the same. Weka needed a third path — a site that took the science seriously without making it inaccessible, and that signaled the “curious and feisty” voice the team uses to describe itself. The design needed to feel editorial rather than pharmaceutical, and nimble rather than enterprise.
Monsoon Design led the visual identity and graphics for the brand, and I translated that system into a web design and built the custom WordPress site around it. The information architecture is organized around how potential partners actually approach biotech companies: what the product is, what it can do, and who is behind it. Dedicated pages for the Nextan™ and Testan™ product lines present molecular specifications and performance characteristics clearly, and a dedicated applications area is built to grow as new use cases emerge.
The result is a site that can evolve alongside the company’s research — a custom WordPress build designed so the Weka team can publish new applications and refine product details themselves, without a developer in the loop for every update. For a small biotech startup iterating on its public story as the science matures, that flexibility is what makes the site work.
