If You Need A DJ

What it was built for

If You Need A DJ is a team of working DJs covering weddings, parties, corporate events and club nights across Essex. Between them the six DJs on the roster carry decades of experience, some stretching back to the Warehouse Party era of the late 1980s.

The business is deliberately not an agency. Every booking is with one of the team directly, and the site had to make that distinction obvious from the first few seconds on the page.

The brief

The business had built a genuinely strong reputation on word of mouth and repeat bookings, but nothing online reflected it. There was no single place that showed the range of events covered, put a face to the people doing the work, or let years of five-star reviews do their job. It also needed to be run day to day by the client, not by us.

Make the "team, not agency" model obvious immediately, not buried in an About page
Give each DJ their own presence, so a client can choose based on experience and style rather than booking a stranger
Put existing testimonials and event photography to work as the primary sales tool
Let the client manage the gallery, testimonials and newsletter without ever touching code
Keep recent Instagram activity visible on the site itself, not just on the app

The approach

The site is built around social proof and people. Four service categories sit at the top of the homepage so a visitor self-selects immediately, and individual profile pages turn a booking decision into a straightforward one: read a real history, see a real track record, then get in touch with a specific person.

Rather than bolt on an off-the-shelf CMS to manage that content, we built a lightweight admin area on top of Supabase, scoped to exactly what the client needs to change: gallery albums, testimonials and the newsletter list. It is simpler to run than a general-purpose CMS and gives the client nothing they don’t need.

The live Instagram feed uses a dedicated feed service rather than Meta’s own embeds, which are unreliable and increasingly restricted, so recent posts render natively in the site’s own design with no ongoing token maintenance.

What it features

Public site

Gallery organised as clickable albums with a cover image and item count, rather than one long flat grid, with a photos/videos filter inside each album
Live Instagram feed on the Socials page, styled to match the site rather than an embedded third-party widget
Testimonials carousel with star ratings, expandable quotes for longer reviews, and auto-advance that pauses on hover
Contact and booking enquiry forms, each sending a notification to the business and an acknowledgement email to the visitor
Newsletter sign-up with unsubscribe handling built in

Admin area

Gated behind its own login, entirely separate from the public site
Drag-and-drop batch upload of photos and videos into named albums, with bulk delete and automatic detection of broken entries
File-size validation before upload, so one oversized file can’t half-publish a batch
Testimonials management feeding both the homepage carousel and the dedicated testimonials page from one source
Newsletter tools: view subscribers, compose and send a campaign, and export the list as a CSV

Infrastructure

Supabase for the database, authentication and file storage, with row-level security enforcing what the admin login can and can’t touch
Two-way transactional email, notifying the business and replying to the visitor across contact, booking and newsletter flows
Automatic deploys from GitHub on every push, with serverless functions handling the API routes

The result

If You Need A DJ now has a site that matches the reputation behind it: a clear route into four kinds of event, real people to book rather than an anonymous agency, and testimonials and recent gigs doing the reassurance work before the phone even rings.

The client runs the gallery, testimonials and newsletter entirely themselves, day to day, without ever needing to ask for a change. The site is now live on the business’s own domain.