Case Study — Website

John Solano
Photography

A luxury wedding and event photography website for a Beverly Hills studio with over two decades of experience — built to convert high-value clients.

Client
John Solano Photography
Category
Website · Photography
Location
Beverly Hills, CA
Year
2026
Status
● Live
umrforge.com/agency/works/john-solano-photography
John Solano
Studio Services Inquire
Beverly Hills · Los Angeles · Destination
Twenty years
of watching
closely.
Documentary-style wedding & event photography from a Beverly Hills studio, built on twenty years of watching closely and shooting honestly.
Inquire Now
View Work →
Experience
20+ Years
Style
Documentary
Coverage
Destination
Studio
Beverly Hills
The Studio
A husband-and-wife team built on trust and documentary instinct.
Lifestyle documentary style — a style that trades stiff formality for spontaneity, letting the atmosphere of the event lead. Every gallery is finished with careful, considered editing.
© 2026 John Solano Photography Beverly Hills, CA · [email protected]

The Brief

A 20-year-old studio. Zero web presence.

John Solano Photography is a Beverly Hills-based wedding and event studio run by a husband-and-wife team with over two decades of documentary photography experience. Despite an exceptional portfolio and a long list of satisfied clients, the studio had no professional web presence — no site, no inquiry flow, nothing for potential clients to land on.

The brief was clear: build a site that reflects the warmth, elegance, and authenticity of the work. It needed to attract high-value clients, tell the studio's story, and make booking an inquiry feel effortless.

Design Direction

Warm. Editorial. Timeless.

The design takes cues from the photography itself — warm ivory backgrounds, deep ink tones, and gold-sage accents. Everything feels handcrafted rather than templated. The typographic system pairs a softly weighted serif (Fraunces) with a clean sans for body text, creating an editorial rhythm that feels both luxurious and readable.

The custom cursor, horizontal gallery section, and the cinematic hero image were all built to create the feeling of flipping through a physical portfolio rather than browsing a website.

Ivory
#F6F1E7
Ink
#26211C
Sage
#7C8B69
Gold
#B69A5E
Rose
#C08876

What We Built

Every detail built from scratch.

🎯
Cinematic Hero
Full-viewport hero image with a custom animated cursor that transforms into a "View" ring when hovering over photos — borrowed directly from the photography world.
🖼️
Horizontal Gallery
A horizontally scrolling image gallery that mimics the physical act of flipping through a portfolio, with smooth inertia scrolling.
📖
Studio Story
A full "About" section that communicates the husband-and-wife dynamic, documentary philosophy, and 20+ year experience — in the studio's own voice.
💌
Inquiry Flow
A clean contact/inquire section with form validation, optimised for converting high-value wedding leads — not generic contact requests.
📱
Fully Responsive
Built mobile-first with a fullscreen animated mobile nav, graceful breakpoints, and touch-optimised gallery scrolling on all screen sizes.
Zero Dependencies
Pure HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks, no bloat. Fast load on all connections — critical for photography clients viewing on mobile.

Tech Stack

Lean. Fast. No framework needed.

The studio's site is intentionally zero-dependency. No React, no build tools, no npm. Just clean HTML, hand-crafted CSS custom properties, and vanilla JavaScript for the cursor, scroll animations, and mobile nav — delivering instant load times even with high-resolution photography.

Deployed on Cloudflare Pages for global CDN distribution and security, with properly structured meta tags and a semantic layout for SEO.

HTML5 CSS3 Vanilla JS Cloudflare Pages Google Fonts CSS Custom Properties Intersection Observer Custom Cursor

Outcome

From zero presence to a professional anchor.

A studio that previously had no web presence now has a site that can stand alongside the best photography studios in Los Angeles. The inquiry form creates a direct pipeline from site visitor to paying client, and the story-driven design communicates trust and experience before a single conversation takes place.

0 → 1
Went from no web
presence to live site
100%
Hand-built —
zero templates used
$500
14-day paid pilot —
full refund guarantee

Ready to start?

Want a site
built like this?

Start with a $500, 14-day paid pilot. Full refund if we don't deliver measurable results. No questions asked.

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