How we built this site: the EMPOWR case.

This site is our first case study, and we decided to build it in public: documenting the decisions, the numbers and the mistakes too. This piece is the diary. It’s updated as the project moves forward.

We started where we start everything: research. Before choosing a single colour we studied the studio market in Mexico and LATAM, twelve local competitors and their published prices, and the international references that set the bar — from Anagrama to Locomotive. The creative direction came out of eight divergent routes narrowed down to one: the one we call Ácido Editorial, quiet luxury surgically interrupted by a green that doesn’t ask for permission.

The most expensive lesson of the project came from an iPhone. The first versions of the prototype hid the content behind animations that depended on JavaScript — and the viewer they were reviewed in doesn’t run JavaScript. Result: a blank page. The rule born from that mistake governs all the code on this site: content exists first, complete and readable; motion is a layer that switches on when the browser can handle it. If you’re reading this, the rule works.

Technical decisions, in short: Astro with static output, because plain HTML is unbeatable for speed; zero UI libraries; under 5 KB of our own JavaScript for all the motion; bilingual /es /en from the architecture up, not as a patch; and AA accessibility treated as a build requirement, not a last-minute audit.

Update, 2 October 2026: the site is now live at empowrstudio.com. We measured Lighthouse in production with PageSpeed Insights and the numbers are in the footer: 100 for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO on the mobile home page, and between 98 and 100 on the other pages we measured. The form is already receiving briefs, though it left us the launch lesson: our provider’s spam filter sent every test brief to spam, and the trail led to the “$” in the investment range. We dropped it from what the form sends and briefs started arriving straight away. What’s next: 90 days after launch — in early January 2027 — we’ll publish the commercial results (visits, leads and projects) with cookie-free analytics data. That’s the point of building in public: we can’t retouch the ending.

— Paola A. González Guerrero · founder, EMPOWR STUDIO