Kays Lens Co.
A photographer's portfolio presented the best way.
Project brief
A Pretoria photographer who needed their images to carry the site. The brief was to rebuild the website from their original host, saving them money and creating a space for clients to open and interact with their Pixieset galleries.
Our mission
Move the photography off its original host onto a site that costs less to run, so the images lead, the design stays out of their way, and every booking enquiry arrives somewhere it cannot get lost.
Issues to solve
- 01Existing site on its original host, costing more to run than it needed to
- 02Wanted a site that felt made, not templated
- 03The contact and booking forms had to carry over field for field, with every enquiry landing in the studio inbox
- 04The design must work around the beautiful imagery
Design decisions
When creative is the right call
Here the design was allowed personality. A distinctive type pairing, an asymmetric grid, with large open spacing.
- A layout that is recognisably designed, not a stock theme
- Full-bleed imagery with room to breathe
Animation, used sparingly
Micro-motions: a soft fade as images enter, a gentle hover state on the grid. Enough to send a message of elegance, without losing subtlety.
- Short transitions keep the user engaged on the content
- Compatible with reduced motion user settings
- Motion is CSS, not a JavaScript animation library
Gallery-heavy efficiency
An image-led site is a performance risk. The gallery was built to load only what is on screen, size each image to the slot it fills, and hold its layout.
- Off-screen images are lazy-loaded
- Each image is resized to the slot it fills, never cropped at source
- Fixed aspect ratios prevent page reflow on load
How it was built
- Type
- Static website with a gallery index
- Build
- Static HTML, CSS and one small script; no build step
- Hosting
- A Cloudflare Worker serving the static files from the edge
- Content
- The six latest galleries appear as cards (cover, title, date) that link through to the client's Pixieset galleries; new sets are a redeploy
- Forms
- Contact and booking forms post to a Worker that emails the studio
- Analytics
- None on the site itself; no third-party trackers
The result
- The gallery index, services, promotions and about pages carry over from the Pixieset site
- Each gallery card opens the client's own Pixieset gallery, so the galleries themselves are untouched
- The contact form keeps all ten of its fields, and the seasonal booking form sits on its own page
- No platform scripts, tracking or error-reporting services load with the site
Want a website built the same way?
Every build starts from a fixed published price and timeline.
Pick your type, or WhatsApp Matt and get a straight answer on what your business needs.