Overview
Jeremiah Manzano is a photo and video editor who needed a portfolio that could do one thing really well: prove his editing skill by putting the before and after side by side. He also had a tight budget, so every technical decision had to earn its keep. I designed and built the site solo, from Figma mockup to production deploy.
The Problem
Two constraints shaped everything:
- Show the transformation, not just the result. Static before/after images don't communicate the work — viewers need to interact with the comparison to feel the impact.
- Keep hosting costs near zero. Video and high-res photography are expensive to serve. A typical media-heavy portfolio would eat into a freelancer's margins fast.
What I Built
- Custom before/after sliders for the photo gallery, so visitors drag to reveal the edit instead of just scrolling past two static images.
- YouTube embeds instead of self-hosted video, offloading the most expensive asset type onto infrastructure that's already free and fast.
- A file-based CMS, so Jeremiah can swap in new work without a database or admin panel to maintain.
- Next.js image optimization (automatic WebP/AVIF, lazy loading, route-based code splitting) to keep load times fast despite a photography-heavy site.
- Right-click and overlay-based image protection, balancing a smooth viewing experience against casual downloading of his work.
Results
- Shipped a fully responsive, production-ready site on Vercel's free tier — no backend, no database, no recurring hosting bill.
- The before/after slider became the centerpiece of the photo section and the feature Jeremiah leads with when showing the site to prospective clients.
- Fast first paint even on media-heavy pages, thanks to lazy loading and automatic image format selection.