Laba Skaņa
Redesigning in Jamstack (Jekyll, NetlifyCMS and Netlify) a freelance DJ and Sound Engineer website allowed to achieve much better performance and streamline design and layout for a better user experience.
Effective Freelancer Website
For a professional freelancer offering DJ and sound engineer services, an effective website is a key client acquisition tool.
It has to load fast, be simple and intuitive to use and has to guide the visitor to the desired action to achieve business goals.
The old version was created using a website builder platform, that initially offered an easy enough DIY solution and produced a reasonably good looking website.
However, the long loading times, disconnected design across website pages and resulting bad user experience were obviously hurting business.
Challenges with the Project
The old version of the freelancer website was build using a visual website builder, and it suffered from the common shortcomings of a website builder platform:
- complicated to make design and functionality coherent across the pages and effective for a freelancer website;
- poor performance, negatively affecting search engine optimisation results and user experience of visitors;
- hard to update and maintain, with questionable security;
- resulting in a cluttered DIY-looking design and navigation, giving a poor user experience for visitors and ultimately costing business.
How I Solved the Challenges
The main focus of the redesign was to make the website an effective marketing and client acquisition tool. Therefore a clean design, good user experience and fast load times were a priority.
The website information architecture, design and navigation were rethought and designed from scratch, giving a smoother experience for visitors, intuitively guiding them to the most valuable actions.
Redesigned freelancer website solved these challenges:
- modern and clean design, with intuitive navigation, resulting in good user experience for visitors;
- custom built from scratch, with all the necessary functionality for an effective freelancer website built in from the start;
- built using modern web development technologies, resulting in a blazing fast performance and robust security;
- easy to update and change content, removing reliance on web developer;
- solid information architecture, guiding visitors to perform the most valuable action, greatly increasing website effectiveness.
Greatly Improved Performance
By using modern web development approach I was able to achieve a perfect 100% performance score. Previously it took more than 5 seconds to fully load the site. Now it loads in less than 2 seconds, even with plenty of pictures.
Performance and security were improved by choosing modern technologies that don’t rely on various 3rd party plugins for essential functions and introducing unnecessary security and maintenance risks.
Mobile-Optimised and Responsive
The new website is fully responsive and mobile-optimised, as most visitors browse websites on mobile devices.
It also helps with search engine optimisation, as Google strongly prefers websites optimised for mobile viewing.
Tech Stack
Built with modern web development technologies. In particular, the website is built with Jekyll static site generator, outputting pure HTML and CSS, with a touch of JavaScript for some added functionality such as the online chat.
Meaning, the website consists of static files that can be served blazing fast, are easy to maintain, and provide top-notch security and peace of mind. Less moving parts mean less can go wrong.
The website is hosted on a globally distributed CDN, meaning that wherever your visitors are in the world, they get served your website from a server close by, thus further improving the already fast viewing experience.
Content can be easily updated via an open-source CMS.
The result - fast, secure and easy to maintain website.
Visit the redesigned DJ website: DJ Ikass un Laba Skaņa
Client Reaction
DJ Ikass was very pleased with the speed, cost, and quality of the website build. He saw a clear benefit from the modern web-development approach, that is easy for him to update through a simple content management system behind an extremely fast and secure website.
The end result is a modern and effective website for marketing his freelancer services.
For me, each new project is a great opportunity learn something new while helping my clients achieve their business goals. In this case, I was able to build a clean and effective website using best practices of modern web development which serves his needs.
Need help with your website? Let’s get in touch!