When a small shop or company in Manila wants a website, there are usually two roads. Buy a template and fill it in yourself, or hire an agency to start from nothing. The first is cheap, but your weekends disappear into settings. The second is thorough, but it begins with putting into words what you want. We wanted a road between the two, so on 2 November we opened a page called Inspo Studio.
It holds twenty homepage designs. Resorts, electric bikes, fashion, a coffee roastery, yacht charters, an esports grand final: fifteen industries in all. Every one opens with a 12-second film in the first screen. Pick the one you like and we rebuild it around your logo, your photos and your words, and take it live for you.
All twenty brands are fictional. We chose names that don't resemble real companies, and each design says on screen that it is a concept design for a fictional brand. We have not yet built a customer's site through Studio. What we can show is samples, and we decided from the start not to dress samples up as track record.
For the Philippine edition we moved every setting, one by one. The yacht route runs from El Nido to Coron, the coffee roastery is in Baguio with beans from Sagada and Mt. Apo, the wellness retreat is in Siargao, the esports final is in Manila. Every amount is in pesos. Even in a sample, place names and a currency from another country make it hard to picture your own shop.
The films are not video files. As with the Inspo Motion samples, code draws them inside the browser. Because no file is streamed, it is light on mobile data, and the type stays sharp at any screen size. Twelve seconds is long enough for the first screen to say what it needs to, and no longer than we want anyone to wait.
We chose 123 photos from a free photo service. Most of the time went into looking for what must not be in them: a label on a perfume bottle, a logo on gaming gear, the shape of a car's front. The perfume bottle and the payment card are not photos at all; we drew them in code. Draw it yourself, and nobody's logo slips in.
We got things wrong, too. Before launch we photographed every page at phone width, 390 pixels, and found the gallery page spreading to 1,300 pixels wide on a phone. The part that shows a 1,280-pixel desktop design scaled down was still taking up its unscaled width and pushing its frame open. On a computer, we never noticed.
The second mistake belonged to this site alone. Our pages start on a light background, so the menu at the top is drawn see-through, with dark text. The Studio pages start on a dark background. When we opened one, the menu text melted into it and could not be read. On the Studio pages only, the menu bar is now solid white from the start.
In the yacht design, on a phone, the island name EL NIDO was cut off at the left edge. The route line and the island names are placed separately, and on a tall screen only the line was being stretched, so they drifted apart. We made them use the same placement. Every one of these would have survived if we had only looked at a computer screen. After the fixes we photographed every page again at phone width and confirmed that none spilled sideways.
Sound is off at first. Pages that make noise the moment they open are usually unwelcome. Only when you turn the sound on does the screen show the free track's title and its composer, because naming them is the condition for using the music.
There are no prices on the page. The work changes a great deal with the number of pages and languages, and with whether you need enquiries or ordering. We quote after hearing from you; the quote is free, and asking commits you to nothing. The contract is with Inspo Nexus Global OPC. We work in English, Filipino (Taglish) and Japanese, and lay each language out for its own line lengths.
If there is one thing to do today, decide the single thing your homepage's first screen should show above all. A dish, where the shop is, or the booking button. Once that is decided, whether you ask Studio or build it yourself, you already know what the first twelve seconds are for.