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Lakes AreaWeb Design
← All work Concept piece

Nocturne, the far end of the dial.

I would talk you out of paying for this. It is on the site so you can see the whole range, and so you know the plain fast site I recommend to you is a choice I made on purpose.

The Nocturne homepage: a soft peach and lilac gradient behind large serif type reading We build the things people remember, the last word in orange italic
Captured from the live site
  • ShapeOne page, no framework
  • WeightAbout 15 kB, no dependencies
  • Everything in itWritten by hand

Nothing is doing the work for me

There is no library behind any of it. The loading sequence, the cursor that trails behind the pointer, the way the lines of text uncover themselves, the cards that stack as you scroll, the numbers that count up. All hand written.

The finished page weighs about 15 kB. That is less than one ordinary photograph on a typical resort website, and it is the entire site rather than a single image on it.

Dark mode, done properly

It follows whatever the device is set to and remembers a change. Roughly half of phone users run dark mode now, and if your guest is checking your availability from bed at eleven at night, a wall of white is a real reason to close the tab.

Motion that is doing a job

Every effect here directs attention rather than showing off. Things appear in the order you should read them. If the visitor's device asks for reduced motion, all of it stops and the page still works completely.

What this means for your site

Very little, and that is the useful part. Your guest wants your rates, your availability and your phone number, in that order, in about four seconds. Effects like these get in the way of that, so I leave them out of the sites I actually sell.

But the person building your plain, fast, boring, effective site is the person who wrote all of this by hand. That is the reason yours will load in about a second instead of five.

Want the sensible version?

Almost everyone should. Fast, clear, seasonal, and built by the same pair of hands.