CASE STUDY · CUSTOM WEBSITE · NEXT.JS · TATTOO STUDIO
The Church Tattoo
“Built so every enquiry lands with the right artist.”
A 10-artist tattoo studio in Wythall, Birmingham. End-to-end build: brand, site, SEO, domain transfer, email, and handover.
- Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack)
- React 19
- TypeScript 5
- Tailwind v4
- GSAP and ScrollTrigger
- Lenis smooth scroll
- SplitType
- Web3Forms
- Vercel
The brief
A busy Victorian schoolhouse studio with 10 resident artists, founded in 2016, with a waiting list built off Instagram and nowhere serious to send people. They needed a proper home for the brand and the artists, a clear booking flow, and a credible base on Google. The goal was a site that looked as considered as the work itself and made it easy to enquire about the right artist, not just the studio in general.
What we did
- 17 fast, prerendered pages: home, artists index, 10 artist detail pages, studio gallery, aftercare, testimonials, contact, and a holding shop page
- Brand-led artist roster styled as a Mortal Kombat arcade screen, with insert-coin start, in-cabinet music, and a sound on selection (client brief: the owner is a lifelong Mortal Kombat fan)
- Each artist's booking button opens a pre-filled email straight to that artist by name, so enquiries never land in a shared inbox
- Contact form wired to Web3Forms with a mailto fallback and a honeypot for spam
- Studio gallery, aftercare accordion, and a testimonials section using real Google reviews
- Full SEO and generative engine setup: structured data for the business, all 10 artists and reviews, sitemap, robots, llms.txt. Lighthouse 96 SEO, 100 accessibility, 100 best practices
- Branded email signature for the studio, hosted on the site with a private install guide at /signature for staff
- Handover document at /handover with content instructions and brand reference for the team
The numbers
Gallery
What we said no to
- Tattoo studio cliches. Gothic typefaces, dripping ink textures, and biker fonts were off the table. The studio is a Victorian schoolhouse with serious artists and the site reads as that.
- A booking widget or CRM. The Church works on relationships, so enquiries go straight to the artist by email, addressed to them by name. No middleware between client and artist.
- WordPress. The studio's content changes a few times a year, not daily. A heavy CMS would have been overhead, not infrastructure.
Stack
- Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack)
- React 19
- TypeScript 5
- Tailwind v4
- GSAP and ScrollTrigger
- Lenis smooth scroll
- SplitType
- Web3Forms
- Vercel
THE SERVICE BEHIND THIS BUILD
Want something like The Church Tattoo? Starter Sites is the service that builds it, or get a fixed-price quote.
Want something like this?
30 minutes, no pitch deck.