Portfolio sites for journalists & freelance writers

Your byline is everywhere.
You should be somewhere.

Squid Lid builds you a home for your published work — every article found automatically, presented beautifully, and looked after by an actual person.

news writers · restaurant critics · travel writers · columnists · feature writers · copywriters · editors

First client

Two decades of bylines, one address.

alexandracarlton.com.au

Alexandra Carlton has written about food and travel for twenty years — Qantas, Escape, Gourmet Traveller, The Australian, and most of the mastheads in between. Her work lived in a hundred scattered links.

Now it lives at her own address: 190+ articles gathered from a dozen publications, a design built around her voice, and a site she runs from her phone.

That's the real site in the frame — live right now. Open it →

What a Squid Lid site does.

Your archive, found

Every week your site sweeps the places you write — publication feeds, author pages, news search — and files anything new as a draft. Nothing goes live without your say-so.

A design that's only yours

No templates. Your site is designed around your work, your voice and the mastheads you write for — and it won't look like anyone else's. Including this one.

Run it from your phone

The Desk is your private editing room: approve found articles, add one by pasting a link, swap a photo, then press put my changes live. No jargon anywhere.

A person, not a platform

Hosting, domain, email — handled. When you want something changed, you email Jack and Jack replies. There is no ticket queue, because there is no ticket system.

How it happens.

  1. 1

    We talk

    About what you write, where it lives, and what you want the internet to see when someone searches your name.

  2. 2

    I gather your archive

    Every byline I can find, back through the years — including the pieces you'd forgotten you wrote.

  3. 3

    I design your site

    Built around your work, reviewed with you. You approve your backlog from the Desk while I polish.

  4. 4

    It stays current

    Weekly sweeps catch your new work. I keep watch over the rest. You just keep writing.

Why “Squid Lid”?

My mum has called me Squid since before I could read. She's a food and travel journalist with twenty years of work scattered across the internet, and Squid Lid began as a favour — I rebuilt her website, then built the tools that gather everything she's ever published into one place she runs from her phone.

Then I realised she isn't the only writer with this problem.

— Jack

Founding clients

Get in while it's small.

Squid Lid is new and deliberately tiny. I'm taking on a first handful of writers personally — which means founding-client pricing, and a direct line to the person who built every part of it.

Tell me what you write. I read everything and reply personally.

Prefer email? jack@squidlid.com.au