Case file № 004 · Client engagement · Conversion architecture
The credits were real. The site was a template.
System
Woodson Aerial website
Client
Woodson Aerial · aerial cinema, Austin
- 110
- page × breakpoint checks
- 91
- production assets verified
- $0
- monthly hosting
A drone cinematography company with genuine credits — Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, NYT Magazine, Red Bull, Meta — had a perfectly serviceable template site that undersold them. I rebuilt it around the one action that pays the business: a stranger asking for a quote.
The system
In
Five verticals of traffic real estate · construction · events · film · FPV
The system
Ten hand-written pages proof beside every ask
Quote endpoint Pages Function · verified live
Out
Quote requests phone optional · stated reply window
Before ✗
- The old site was fine — clean, professional, a template doing what templates do. That was the problem: work going back to 2018, a six-aircraft fleet, and a client list most production companies would envy, presented generically.
- A template is organized around the template. It was not organized around the three things that convert this business: response speed, proof beside the ask, and one unambiguous next step.
- The proof lived far from the ask — credits on one page, contact on another, and nothing telling a stranger how fast they’d hear back.
After ✓
- A ten-page custom site built to a written design direction — no framework and no build step: hand-written HTML, one stylesheet, one script.
- Five vertical landing pages — real estate, construction, events, film & TV, FPV — each with its own local copy and its own call to action.
- Every page ends in the same ask: a short quote form with phone optional, client quotes sitting beside it rather than exiled to a testimonials page, a stated reply window, and a sticky call/quote bar on phones.
- The portfolio leads with the real, verifiable record — five released films that play in place, the two NYT Magazine issues linked to the actual articles, real location stills, and full per-aircraft specs.
- Third-party video is click-to-load: a self-hosted still and a plain link until someone presses play, so no video host is contacted on load. The showreel streams from object storage on the client’s own subdomain, which is what keeps hosting at nothing a month.
- Verified, not assumed: 110 page-by-breakpoint combinations with zero horizontal overflow, every referenced asset confirmed serving, every form proven working end to end, and every hidden-until-revealed state shown to resolve so a script failure can never leave a page blank.
The verdict
A client asks for a website. What they need is someone to read the business first — find the proof it already owns and isn’t showing, and rebuild the front door around the action that actually pays. The result is a sales instrument, not a brochure.
Bill of materials
| Hand-written HTML · CSS · JS | no framework, no build step, nothing to rot |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages + Functions | hosting and the quote endpoint |
| Cloudflare R2 | the showreel, on the client’s own subdomain |
| AVIF/JPEG pipeline | scripted image builds, every size accounted for |