Slomo Casino
Web Design and Development
TLDR:
- Static site with serverless functions
- Hosted on Netlify
- Built with Gatsby
- Styled with Tailwind
- Integrated with Stripe, WeScanTickets and MailChimp
- Content managed with netlify CMS
Slomo Casino are a recently founded band from Stockport and I was tasked with building their website from scratch. The brief was to create a site that acted a hub for their online presence with links to social media and music platforms, advertising band activity such as upcoming shows and new releases, and online merchandise sales.
As a new band, their budget was tight and they wanted a site that could grow with them. Services with generous free tiers like Netlify and MailChimp and PAYG services like Stripe were perfect.
Design was also important to them. They wanted a bespoke design that was on brand and allowed their personality to shine through. In keeping with the casino theme I developed a custom mobile menu resembling a hand of cards unfolding as seen in the video below.
I also developed a novel way of showcasing their videos using a interactive slot machine, again keeping with the casino theme. A demo can be seen in the video below or played on the site here. At the time of writing Slomo Casino had only released a single video, as more are released they will be added to the wheels and matching 3 will set that video to play in the iframe.
Initially the plan was have a full catalogue of merch available to purchase, so the site was developed to integrate with Snipcart for a full-featured e-commerce solution. However, the amount of merch available was drastically scaled back and so Stripe was deemed suitable to manage the much smaller inventory (At the time of writing, the merch had not been released and so was not live).
The experience of integrating Snipcart was of great value, despite it ultimately being dropped. Products were added using Netlify CMS, passing their details, including custom options and tiered pricing, to Snipcart's API for an easily extensible and cheap e-commerce solution.
The ease of integrating Snipcart into the site was evident once it had to replaced with Stripe Checkout at no great pain.
Once Stripe Checkout was chosen to handle merch sales, products were created in Stripe's dashboard and sourced at build time, with the data passed to the components created for Snipcart.
Netlify CMS was integrated to manage some of the site's frequently updated data, such as:
- Upcoming shows, ticket sales links and ticket availability
- Social links and the Spotify playlist embed
- YouTube embed links for the slot machine
- Product images and variations
- Homepage banners
With Netlify's automatic builds and the Git-based CMS, site rebuilds are triggered whenever an update is made in the back end with the new site pushed live automatically.