Swamp City Stompers
Swamp City StompersThe Challenge
The Swamp City Stompers play southern rock, blues, soul and outlaw country around the Ottawa Valley. The first site we built them was a multi-page scroll experience with smooth scrolling, animated page transitions and a build pipeline behind it. It looked great.
It was the wrong shape for the job. A band site has two visitors: someone deciding whether to come out on Friday, and a booker deciding whether to hire them. Both want the same handful of things quickly, on a phone, often in a parking lot with one bar of signal. Neither of them asked for a cinematic journey.
The Approach
We rebuilt it as one page. Hero, who they are, the band, tour dates, video, press kit, contact. Everything a fan or a booker needs is one scroll away and no page load away.
There is no build step and no animation library. Section reveals use IntersectionObserver, which is the browser doing natively what a library was doing before. The palette went oxblood, gold and parchment, with a self-hosted type stack of Patua One, IM Fell English SC, Libre Caslon and Special Elite, to get the feel of a torn gig poster without loading a photograph of one.
Tour dates live in a single data file, so adding a show means editing one entry instead of four places and hoping they agree.
The Result
Live at swampcitystompers.ca. The earlier version is archived rather than deleted, because it was good work that answered a question nobody had asked.
The lesson carries into client work. The first build was more impressive and the second one is better. Matching the size of the solution to the size of the problem is most of this job, and it is the easiest part to skip when the fun thing to build is sitting right there.