Authors & Academia · WordPress · 2025

Mahasti Afshar

Mahasti Afshar is an author, translator, and cultural executive. Her career includes television production in Iran, a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European studies from Harvard, leadership roles at the Getty Conservation Institute and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and an ongoing focus on research and literary translation.

★★★★★ 4.9 stars · 28 reviews across Clutch, Google & Yelp

Screenshots of Mahasti Afshar's minimalist WordPress website showcasing her work as an author and translator, including sections for contact, articles, talks, and a tribute to her late husband, Hossein Ziai.

The challenge

Mahasti needed a home for decades of work across multiple formats: books, translations, articles, talks, and video documentaries. The site also needed to include a personal tribute to her late husband, philosopher Hossein Ziai. Everything had to feel organized without coming across as cluttered or academic.

The solution

We built a clean, minimal WordPress site that stays out of the way. Each content type has its own section, the navigation is straightforward, and the design uses restrained typography and whitespace to keep the focus on the writing itself. Simple and elegant, exactly what was asked for.

Mahasti Afshar is a Los Angeles-based author and translator whose work spans Iranian cultural history, literary translation, and archival scholarship from her years at the Getty Conservation Institute and the Shiraz Arts Festival. We built her author site — a relationship that goes back to 2017.

The problem

A working scholar with a body of work spread across decades and formats — books, translations, academic articles, recorded talks, museum exhibitions, archival PDFs from the 1960s — needed a single home that did the material justice. The architecture had to be legible to readers, researchers, and acquiring editors at once, and it had to leave room for the catalogue to keep growing as Mahasti continued to publish.

What we delivered

An information architecture built around her work. Sitemap, content matrix, and per-page Drive folders mapped before development began. Books, Articles, Talks, and a dedicated Shiraz PDFs section for archival materials from the 1960s–70s festival — each page sized to the way scholars and readers actually move through this kind of catalogue.
A clean, literary WordPress build. Strong typographic hierarchy, professional portraiture, abstracts written and formatted for every title, and PDF/external-link handling for articles. Book schema, Person schema, and WebPage schema in the markup so the catalogue surfaces correctly in search.
A page for Hossein Ziai. A dedicated tribute page on mahastiafshar.com honouring Mahasti’s late soulmate, the philosopher and Islamic studies scholar — linking through to the Hossein Ziai site we built in 2017 and preserving continuity across both properties.
WebCare, ongoing. Cloudways hosting, Cloudflare DNS and Turnstile, SendGrid for form delivery, GA4/GSC/GTM, monitored backups. Mahasti submits corrections, abstract replacements, and menu changes; we apply them.

Why it matters

The relationship is nearly a decade long. It started in 2017 with the Hossein Ziai website — a labour-of-scholarship project covering biography, bibliography, books, and family-tree material. Mahasti kept sharing published work over the years, and in 2024 we began discussions for her own site. mahastiafshar.com launched in 2025 and is now under an active WebCare retainer. The kind of client who reads carefully and corrects precisely — the same scholarly attention she brings to her translations.

WordPress · information architecture, design, development, ongoing care.

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