Danny Solomon
One actor, seven screens, two working props.
A website for an English actor and voice over artist. A casting director gets his reel, his voice, his face and his agent in under a minute, and the site still feels like his.
- Type
- Personal website for an actor and voice over artist
- Year
- 2026 · represented by Crawford Talents, Berlin and London
- Services
- Web design and build · Copy · Technical SEO and AI search · Accessibility · Hosting setup
01Origin
A prototype that had to become a real site
Danny Solomon is an English actor and voice over artist. He trained at Mountview in London and works on stage, on screen and behind a microphone.
Danny is a friend. I built the first version of his site in Lovable in July 2026. It looked right, but it was a prototype on someone else's platform. On 14 September 2026 I took the code out and rebuilt it as a proper project, so it could be fixed, tested and handed over.
It's not a restaurant, but an actor's site has the same job as a small venue's: get the right person to the booking in as few clicks as possible, without looking like everyone else.
- 01Rebuild
- 02Showreel
- 03Voice demos
- 04Photos
- 05Press
- 06Search
- 07Testing
- 08Launch
The job, roughly in the order it happened.
02The brief
Reel, voice, face, agent
The people who use an actor's site are busy and specific. A casting director wants the reel, the face and the agent. A voice producer wants to hear the voice.
Seven rules held the build together, locked on 16 September after studying live actor sites.
One big photo owns the first screen
The name can run off the edge
Proof sits high, before any scroll
Menus stay tiny
His agent, one click from every screen
Faces fill the frame
One visual idea per section
03The world
A 1970s film poster you can walk through
Each section is one prop from a working actor's life, and each prop does a real job.
Section by section
The props
The TV and the cassette deck are AI-generated product images, made in Higgsfield. Every photo of Danny is real photography.
Plays the showreel through its curved glass.
Click a tape and it drops in and plays.
Stage photos and headshots, click to enlarge.
Quotes pinned up like clippings.
Playing age, height, accents, languages, training.
His agent's email, phones and offices.
Confidential casting fileRef: DS-CAST-01
- Playing age
- 34 – 42
- Height
- 6′1″ (185 cm)
- Appearance
- Rugged, intense
- Voice type
- Baritone (earthy, strong, warm)
- Native accent
- Derbyshire
- Languages
- English (native), German (intermediate)
- Training
- Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, London
- Other accents
- RP, Scottish, Irish, Yorkshire, South African, American (NY, Southern, Standard)
04Identity
Print poster, not app
Sharp corners, hard shadows, film grain. The 1970s feel comes from texture as much as colour.
The name, as artwork
The TV, AI-generated
The deck, AI-generated
Hand-labelled tapes
On stage
Headshot
The hero cut-out
The tape libraryPick things up. Everything here is on the site.
Seven colours, each with one job. Tap to copy.
Bold italic capitals with wide tracking, for the name and section titles.
Body copy, menus and the small spaced labels.
The casting file and the call sheet, typed like real paperwork.
The rules: one diagonal cut closes every section, always at the same angle. One shadow, a hard 6px rust offset with no blur. Corners stay at 6px. Colours come only from the named tokens.
05The website
Seven screens, one question each
Seven full-height screens that snap as you scroll. Each one answers one question a visitor brings.
Hero
Who is he, and has anyone rated him?
Name, portrait, press lineVideo
Can he act on camera?
The TVVoice
What does he sound like?
The cassette deckGallery
What does he look like, on stage and off?
Two carouselsReviews
What do critics say?
Seven productionsAbout
Does he fit the part?
The casting fileRepresentation
Who do I call?
The call sheetFour channels, four ways to see him work
A photoreal 1970s TV with the reel fitted to its curved glass. Channel 1 plays his showreel. Channels 2 to 4 each play a photo reel from one production: Playland, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and Jesus Hopped the A-Train.
The photo reels hold those keys until the comedy and theatre reels are cut. Try 2, 3 and 4 here; the video on channel 1 only plays on Danny's own site.
Click a tape. It plays.
Five demos on hand-labelled cassettes: Corporate, Commercial, Narrative, Fantasy and General American. One click loads the tape into the deck and starts it; Stop, Pause and Eject do what they say.
Danny recorded the demos himself. These are 20-second cuts; the full ones are on his site.
Tape library
The call sheet, from any screen
A small "Representation" tag follows you from the second screen down, so his agent is never more than one click away. It ends on a call sheet: Crawford Talents' email, Berlin and London phones and offices, and his Spotlight CV.
Under the surface: separate pages for the showreel, voice, gallery and reviews so each can be found in search; structured data and an llms.txt so search engines and AI assistants can tell this Danny Solomon from the others; self-hosted fonts; skip link, focus rings and reduced motion.
Confidential // official representation
Ref: DS-REP-01
Representation ↓
06The design loop
Nothing moved on "looks fine to me"
Every screen went through the same loop: study the best, write the bar, build to it, check it from real pixels, then test it with people who'd use it.
The references were live actor and voice over sites, Deidre Rose, Adam Fontana and Leith Burke among them, plus a 20-site survey. Only their working mechanisms came across, never their look.
15 commits in two days. The screen's curve traced from the photo, the keys re-measured from real pixels. A spinning intro tried and dropped: it didn't match the rest of the site.
9 commits on 16 September. A three-outfit cross-fade built and reverted the same day for one still photo.
Darkroom and filmstrip props dropped for two plain carousels. Then real stage photos, a lightbox, and keyboard use.
One-click tapes after the first panel, an Eject timing bug, a clipped label, and working REW and F.FWD keys.
Each dot is one commit to that piece. A hollow dot is work that was tried and taken out.
07How it was made
Human-directed, AI-produced
I set the direction, made every call and checked every screen. AI tools did a lot of the production, and here is which ones.
| Part | Tools | My role |
|---|---|---|
| First version | Lovable | Built it, then took the code out |
| Build | TanStack Start, React, Tailwind, Claude Code | Direction, review, every design decision |
| TV and cassette deck | Higgsfield (AI-generated images) | Prompts, choosing takes, fitting them to the screen |
| Photos of Danny | Real photography | Selection and crops |
| Copy | Aaron & Claude assisted | Facts only from Danny's own material |
| Hosting | Netlify, Porkbun, Google Search Console | Set up in my name for the first year, then handed to Danny |
First load of the home page before and after the launch sweep on 5 October. The largest image now lands in 1.5 seconds on desktop, down from 4.2.
A three-outfit hero
Built and pulled the same day. Rule one: one big photo owns the first screen.
Darkroom props in the gallery
Filmstrips and darkroom graphics went for two plain carousels. The photos are the point.
Inventing credits
There's no credits list yet, because Danny hasn't sent one. The site doesn't guess.
08Testing
200 visitors, and six fixes the same day
On launch day I put the live build in front of 200 simulated visitors, 25 from each of eight audiences.
The panel was synthetic: AI personas built to match UK casting directors, German-market casting, voice over buyers, theatre directors, talent agents, other actors, boutique hospitality owners and sceptical theatregoers. It's directional, not a substitute for real casting calls.
noticed there's no credits list: show, role, company, year. It was the biggest single complaint, from casting directors and agents most of all.
● one visitor who asked for credits
- His agent is easy to find197 of 200 found Crawford Talents' details. 186 found the reel.
- Voice was the favourite52 of 200 picked it. People who played a tape rated the props 6.7; people who didn't, 3.8.
- Buyers rated it higherThe 125 casting, agent, voice and theatre buyers gave "would book" 6.3. Theatre directors were warmest: 6.9, with trust at 7.9.
- Phones lost people at Voice16 left early, and 8 of them at the Voice section, mostly on phones.
Six fixes
- The loaded tape read "NARATIVE". It now reads NARRATIVE.
- Channels 2 to 4 stopped replaying the one reel. Each now plays a photo reel from one production, and a plain "Play the showreel" link sits beside the TV.
- REW and F.FWD skip 10 seconds. REC says the demo tapes are write-protected.
- The hero press line now credits both actors the review praised.
- On phones, the Representation tag moved clear of the section labels, and the deck and tapes share the screen evenly.
- The separate showreel, voice and gallery pages lost their "Section 01" numbering.
The props stay
A minority called them gimmicks, but the people who used them rated the site higher.
Credits, a CV PDF, review dates and a second reel need Danny's facts, and I won't fill them with guesses. Contact stays agent-only: that's Crawford Talents' call, not mine.
Testing informs the work; it doesn't write it.
09Timeline
Three months from first draft to live
Jul
First version built in Lovable
14 Sep
Taken out of Lovable and rebuilt
The photoreal TV goes in, with the reel fitted to its curved glass.
15 Sep
TV keys re-measured from real pixels; the reel's start-up stall cut
16 Sep
Bar locked, hero redesigned, real stage photos, first SEO audit
28 Sep
First visitor panel
Reviews board added, one-click tapes, a prompt on the blank TV.
5 Oct
Live at dannysolomonactor.com
Launch sweep, a 200-visitor panel and six fixes the same day, then photo reels on channels 2 to 4.
10What's next
Credits, then more reels
A credits list and a CV PDF once Danny sends them, dates and links on the reviews, and the comedy and theatre video reels, which will take over from the photo reels on channels 2 to 4.
What it means for your business
Your best thing, working on the page
His reel and voice play inside the site. For you, that's the menu, the room or the booking.
One click to the person who says yes
His agent is reachable from every screen. Yours is the booking or the phone.
Look like yourself
The props are his. Your identity gets found the same way, on its own terms.
Found by name
Structured data and separate pages, so search and AI assistants send people to you.
Tested before you see it
A visitor panel, fixes the same day, and an honest list of what I left alone.
It feels good that I have a website that I am proud to send out to casting directors and potential employers.
I’m so happy with Aaron’s design for my website. We discussed a design that was a little different and he found a creative angle that fitted me perfectly.
All of my reels, demos, photos and reviews are easy to find and presented in a really fun and memorable way. He was communicative the whole time, quick to turn around edits and was always ready with great ideas.
It feels good that I have a website that I am proud to send out to casting directors and potential employers. I’d wholeheartedly recommend Aaron to any creative who wants a site that actually looks and feels like them rather than a generic template.
Want people to find you, then book you?
- Direction, design and build
- Aaron Reilly
- Writing and code
- Aaron Reilly, assisted by Claude
- Images
- Photos of Danny: real photography. TV and cassette deck: AI-generated in Higgsfield.
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