The numbers
8.8s
1.5s
Time until the main content appears, on a phone
3,036 KB
398 KB
Weight of the home page
36
100
Google Lighthouse performance score
Google Lighthouse, mobile, October 2026 — before and after, same test.
Before / after
The same fold, rebuilt. Drag to compare.
01
A directory the Authority runs itself
Member businesses are a custom post type with a pending state, so a new listing waits for review instead of going straight out. The dashboard carries a running count of what is waiting, and the queue is relabelled “Pending review” so it reads as a job rather than a status. Nobody emails a developer to add a shop.
02
Fly down State Street
The directory also exists as a photoreal 3D map, built on Google’s Maps 3D tiles. Every member business is pinned and colour-coded by category, searchable from the panel, and the camera flies to whichever one you pick. It is the whole town, from above, with the shops marked.
03
An events calendar the town can feed
Anyone can submit an event from the site; it arrives for review rather than publishing itself, and the form is guarded by a honeypot, a time trap and a nonce so the queue stays worth reading. The old calendar listed events as flat JPEG posters — unreadable on a phone and invisible to search.
04
A merch store, properly
Eight products on WooCommerce with PayPal checkout. The product photography that came with the old shop was a set of cropped snapshots of models — several with the face cut off mid-frame, every one at a different scale and crop, so the range did not read as a range. Each garment was rebuilt into a clean flat lay on a white ground using generative tooling, from those same source photographs: one scale, one crop, the whole mark legible on every item.
The product shots
The same five garments, from the old shop and the new. Drag to compare.
05
Their own town, not a stock library
The old site illustrated “Things To Do” with stock photography — shopping bags, a generic couple at dinner. We shot State Street instead: the storefronts, the street, the people actually in it, plus the aerial footage the home page opens on. Everything on the site is Media.
