Filippa Dressage
A working dressage barn needed a site that looked like the discipline it teaches — quiet, exact, and built around photographs rather than copy. One page, no framework, no build step, and no monthly platform fee.
The brief
Dressage is a sport of precision and restraint, and the client's existing web presence was neither. The job was a single page that could carry a serious photographic portfolio — arena, barn, grounds, and the trainer working with the horses — without the visual noise of a template, and that a visitor on a phone at a barn with poor signal could still load.
What we built
The entire site is one self-contained HTML file. The logo and hero photograph are embedded directly in the document so they render even before anything else loads. Everything else is progressive: the two gallery sets — The Facility and Kristin — load from locally optimised derivatives generated by a script in the repo, and each image carries an automatic fallback to the photographer's original if a local file is ever missing.
- Editorial black-and-white treatment that reveals full colour on hover, so the grid reads as one composition and individual photographs still get their moment.
- Full-screen lightbox on click, keyboard navigable, with no third-party gallery library.
- Tabbed photo sets so the facility and the trainer are browsable separately without a page load.
- An image pipeline in the repo — one script regenerates every derivative and the manifest that tracks them, so adding photographs is a command rather than a redesign.
The decision we didn't make
The contact form deliberately routes to Instagram rather than an email address. An earlier address on the site was a dead inbox that silently swallowed real enquiries from prospective clients — the worst possible failure for a small business, because it looks like nothing is wrong. Rather than invent a replacement address, the form points at a channel the client actually reads every day. A working route to a real human beats a professional-looking one that goes nowhere.
Result
The site is live and serves the client's real business. It costs nothing to host, has no dependencies to patch, and the client owns the code outright — if they ever move on from us, the site moves with them.