Voice-over artists live or die by how fast a casting director can hit play. Jenna's old site made them wait.
Jenna Pinchbeck is a voice-over artist and actor. Her voice has run on Amazon, Hulu, Forbes, and LG, plus animation, commercials, podcasts, and documentaries. Full stops. She's also a repeat client. This is the second site I've built for her, and the fact that she came back four years after the first one is the only review I take seriously.
Before
Her first site was a Wix she made herself. It had personality, which I respected. It also loaded slowly and barely registered in Google, which she didn't. The stock Wix audio player couldn't cleanly host the number of demos she needed, and the video embed did its own weird thing. Two essential tools, both slightly broken.
Build
I rebuilt on Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind. Hosted on Vercel. Contentful handles the CMS.
I'll defend the Contentful pick against the engineers who would have rolled a custom admin for her. A solo voice-over artist does not want to learn a proprietary dashboard. She wants a form. Contentful ships one that already works, for less than a week of my time would cost her. The right move for a solo studio working with solo clients is to use the boring thing that ships tomorrow.
The features Jenna leaned on: custom audio and video players tuned to her brand so the experience matches the work, and a VO Log, an audio blog with auto-generated transcripts so a listener can read along. That one was a reach. I hadn't built auto-transcription before. Built it anyway.
Quiet Pride
The detail most visitors will never notice: every demo and project page on the site is generated from the same short form. Four fields in, a cleanly branded project page out. She never sees a CMS admin, she never writes HTML, she never calls me. But because she keeps adding work, Google keeps indexing new pages, and casting directors keep finding her in search. The whole SEO layer is a byproduct of making her life easier. That's the right order to build things in.
Outcome
Lighthouse is 100 / 100 / 100 across performance, best practices, SEO. Accessibility is 92, which I'd rather push to 100 but won't fake. Around 200 users in the first few days after launch. Four years ago the first rebuild doubled her traffic; this version hasn't been live long enough for a clean comparison yet.
Peer interest was faster than I expected. Multiple members of Scrappy VO, a collective of working voice-over artists, messaged Jenna asking who built the site. Her manager emailed, unprompted:
“I really like it, both the aesthetic as well as the functionality.”
Soft win I trust: Jenna came back for version two.
Redo
If I started tomorrow, I'd scope the VO Log into week one instead of week three. It was the most interesting thing in the build and it got the least time.