- 6illustrated chapters
- 11scenes drawn
- 2reading modes
- 0stock photos
What was wrong with the old site
Agency sites tend to be a list of services with stock photography between them. Everyone writes the same five capability cards, so a visitor cannot tell two studios apart and falls back on price.
The brief here was to make a site that could not be mistaken for anyone else, and to do it without a photography budget or a single client logo to lean on.
What got built
- A six-chapter narrative - the leak, the diagnosis, the build, the proof, it holds, connected - where the scroll is the story
- Eleven original illustrations of one recurring character, drawn in a single consistent hand
- A Story / Direct toggle that reframes the same content for a browsing reader and a buying reader
- A drag-to-compare panel, so the visitor pulls the chaos away themselves instead of being told it improved
- A capability grid, a five-stage process, an FAQ and a contact flow, all on one page
- Hosted on Cloudflare Workers, no CMS, no page builder
Why it was built this way
One character instead of photography. A mascot doing the work shows what the studio does in a glance, costs nothing per page, and cannot be bought by a competitor from the same stock library.
Two reading modes rather than one compromise. A visitor browsing and a visitor buying want opposite things. Forcing both down a single path loses one of them, so the narrative version and the stripped-down version are both first class.
A drag handle instead of a before-and-after claim. Telling someone the mess got cleaned up is a claim. Letting them wipe it away with their own cursor is a demonstration, and it holds attention in a way a paragraph does not.
Where it stands
The site is live and the illustrated system is complete. The work section publishes three engagements as scope snapshots rather than finished case studies, each labelled as awaiting client sign-off, and the testimonials are marked as placeholders pending permission to publish the real wording.
That labelling is deliberate and stays on the page. A portfolio that invents quotes to fill a section is worth less than one that admits the section is still waiting.