Web design / Los Angeles, CA
The reel that never finishes loading
Los Angeles is full of people whose living depends on how their work looks on a screen, and a surprising number of them show it badly. An editor in Burbank, a colorist with a room in Hollywood, a set designer, a product photographer working out of a shared studio downtown: the work is excellent, and the website is a six-minute reel with an email address underneath it. The producer who clicked through from a pitch email watches a spinner for three seconds, then closes the tab.
More video rarely fixes that. Less of it, chosen harder, usually does. Put a still frame up that appears instantly, let the clip start only when someone asks for it, and write two lines under each project saying what you actually did on it. A stranger can’t tell from a montage whether you shot the thing or graded it.
We plan motion and film for the web with that order in mind: what loads first, what waits, what never needs to autoplay. Our portfolio guide for creatives goes further into how a portfolio should be sequenced, including the uncomfortable part about cutting your favorite project because it doesn’t sell the work you want next.
Everyone else selling something you can see
The entertainment crowd gets the attention, but plenty of LA businesses live or die on product photography too. Small apparel and beauty labels that sell direct, furniture makers, the cake shop with a waiting list. For them the product page *is* the website, and a homepage carousel of five moody lifestyle shots does less work than one clear photo with the price beside it and a size chart that opens without a pop-up. If you’re selling online, read our notes on e-commerce sites before you commission another photoshoot.
Some brands do need something louder for a launch. A 3D product render can show the inside of a bag or the back of a bottle without booking a studio day, and it can be reused in ads afterwards. We’ll tell you when a good photographer would do the job better.
Eighty-eight cities, then Orange County
Los Angeles County has 88 incorporated cities, and people answer “where are you?” with one of them or with a neighborhood: Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale, Silver Lake, Studio City, Boyle Heights. A family in Pasadena looking for a pediatric dentist types “Pasadena”, not “Los Angeles”. A contractor who covers the San Fernando Valley and the Westside needs to say both, in sentences, on pages that explain what’s different about each.
Orange County is its own market. A dental group in Irvine and a design shop in Echo Park aren’t trying to impress the same people, and the site for one won’t suit the other. If you work on both sides of the county line, we’d usually build separate pages for each rather than pretending it’s one place.
How this works without an office in town
We’re remote, so there’s no LA studio to visit. Calls happen on Pacific Time, and each review is a shared link light enough to check on set between takes. Sites are built in Framer, which means when the new reel is cut, your coordinator can swap it in herself on Friday instead of waiting on us.
Two questions worth answering early
Will a heavy video page hurt us in Google?
Video itself doesn’t. A page that shows nothing for several seconds does, and so does a page where every word is baked into the footage, because search engines can’t read it. We keep the text as real text, compress the clips properly and load them late. If your current site is already slow, technical SEO is where we’d start before redesigning anything.
Can you build a site for one film or one release?
Yes. A short-lived site for a festival run or an album drop is a reasonable project, and it’s easier than people expect to retire it afterwards or point the address at the next one.