Making Okiem’s website feel like a performance, not a brochure

Objectives

Key skills

The previous site's design didn't reflect Okiem's actual sound — dated, generic, and missing the atmosphere his music has, which did him no favours with a prospective booker or listener deciding whether to click through to the music or an event page.

Beyond the surface, the site was hard to manage: built on Wix, updates required technical knowledge Okiem didn't have, so every new track, video, or event update depended on outside help. Media specifically — audio and video, the core of his work — was difficult to update or showcase properly.

The new site was built fully custom on Duda rather than adapted from a template — bespoke design elements throughout, created specifically for the immersive, atmospheric feel the previous site never had.

A few platform limitations came up along the way; each one was worked around rather than used as a reason to simplify the design down to what Duda made easiest.

Custom didn't mean slow, either — the finished site loads in 2.7 seconds on mobile, proof that a fully bespoke, atmosphere-first build doesn't have to trade performance away for polish.

Every design decision — typography, layout, visual flow — was made to reflect the actual feel of Okiem's music, not just to look clean. The goal was a site that feels like a performance in itself, not a static brochure sitting beside the music.

That atmosphere-first approach shows up directly in how visitors behave: engagement on the new site is up 100% over the old one, visitors spending meaningfully longer with the work once the site itself stopped working against it.

The site was handed over with full documentation and a setup built specifically so Okiem could update music, events, and media entirely on his own, without needing technical help for routine changes.

That was a deliberate move off the previous platform, Wix, which had required outside technical knowledge for anything beyond the basics.

Duda's more intuitive editing tools made that handoff realistic rather than theoretical — the difference between a site the artist merely owns and one he can actually run himself, day to day.