Project overview

Koba Jiujitsu are a martial arts club based in Dorking, Surrey. They run classes for adults, kids, and teenagers providing a fun, safe and productive training environment where people can get a work out, make friends, and work on their Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) skills.

I am proud to have been allowed back to make their second website having developed their previous site several years ago.

This new website takes everything we learned from the previous job and gives it a more polished, professional appearance, and is designed to be able to expand as Koba Jiujitsu continue to grow their business.

Technical implementation

I wanted this site to feel fast, friendly, and easy to use on any device, so I focused on performance, accessibility, and visual clarity throughout.

Some key technical features include:

• Phoenix LiveView single-page application with server-rendered interactions for speed and reliability.
• The responsive, mobile-first layout was built with user experience and accessibility in mind.
• Engaging image-heavy UI featuring optimized image assets, lazy loading and carousel components.

Key challenges

A major consideration for both front and back-end work was making the most of Koba’s regular mobile phone photos. They capture the friendly, hard working community of martial artists, but they’re often low resolution and portrait oriented, which doesn’t fit well with typical wide, high-res web layouts.

The UI was designed around that constraint, giving smaller images space to lead the visual story while still looking neat and professional. The CMS makes it easy to upload and tag new images.

Across the site, images are selected and ordered by relevance, making it simple for Koba to keep their images fresh and up to date.

The result

The finished website is a performant single page application built on Phoenix LiveView, with a mobile first layout that feels good on any device. A custom admin area and CMS built on Phoenix generators makes it straightforward for Koba Jiujitsu to keep content and images up to date.

Thoughts and feelings

Replacing a website which I originally built so many years ago was an interesting chance to reflect on how much I have grown as a programmer in this time.

As a BJJ practitioner, and coach at Koba Juijitsu this one was enjoyable to work on. The new website is faster, more informative, and much nicer to look at than its predecessor so I am proud of the result.