AKA Insight

Sharper Mobile Layouts and a Faster Site for an Award-Winning NYC Architect

AKA Insight (Allegra Kochman Architecture) designs complete home transformations for pre-war apartments in Manhattan, and their site sells that work visually: award-winning renovations, before-and-after sliders, and video testimonials from clients. The desktop site was in good shape. Phones were another story. Spacing drifted from page to page, hero photos cropped awkwardly, the video player misbehaved, and some project pages were loading more than 50 MB of images.

We started with the technical foundation: a PHP upgrade, a full Site Health review with plain-English notes on which warnings were real problems and which were harmless hosting quirks, and a cleanup of old backup archives that were eating the hosting storage. Then came the mobile work. Rather than patching pages one at a time, we built a single sitewide spacing system with a few named settings the AKA team can adjust themselves, tuned mobile line height to the reading rhythm of the New York Times app, and rebuilt every case study hero so the photo scales cleanly with nothing cropped.

On the project pages we swapped in sharper AI-upscaled hero images, fixed before-and-after sliders that were stuck behind a loading overlay, and replaced two 8K camera originals that were being sent to every visitor. The heaviest case study went from 52.7 MB to 6.5 MB. AI let us audit every row on the site for spacing in minutes instead of days, which is a big part of how a project this detailed fit a small-business budget.