Paintball Bled
A brand-new, video-first marketing site for a forest paintball venue outside Bled — Vite build, hand-rolled 5-language i18n, autoplay hero, and a booking flow tuned for groups rather than individuals.
Overview
This is the fresh Vite rebuild. The previous paintball-bled.com was a WordPress + Divi site that had served the business for years — but it had accumulated the usual WordPress weight (slow, heavy CSS, clumsy on mobile). The client wanted a clean restart: a fast, modern marketing page that reads in five languages, runs on a single video-backed hero, and still sends every serious visitor into a booking conversation.
I built the whole thing as a static Vite bundle — plain HTML, vanilla JavaScript, no React, no Vue, no CMS. Every translatable string lives in JSON; every element in the DOM that needs translating carries a data-i18n=“keypath” attribute. A small runtime swaps copy on the fly when the visitor picks SLO / ENG / DEU / ITA / ESP in the header. Package cards are rendered dynamically so they stay translation-first instead of hard-coded per locale.
The staging site lives at nova.paintball-bled.com. Once the client signs off, it moves to the main domain with a straightforward static upload. No server-side runtime, no plugin updates, nothing to monitor beyond the DNS and the SSL cert.
Architecture
Reading the diagram: Four source inputs — the HTML template marked up with data-i18n attributes, a single vanilla JS entry, five locale JSON files, and the media assets — feed into a single Vite build. The output is a content-hashed dist/ bundle that’s served statically from the staging host today and will cut over to the main domain when the client approves. There is no server runtime, no CMS, no backend: every locale switch happens in the visitor’s browser against the already-delivered JSON. Typography is Bebas Neue (display) + Plus Jakarta Sans (body), preconnected to Google Fonts for sub-second first paint.
Six things shipped,
three hard ones solved.
Key contributions
- Hand-rolled the entire front-end — Vite as the bundler, vanilla HTML + JavaScript, no framework overhead. Final bundle: one JS file + one CSS file, both cache-busted via content hash.
- Built a
data-i18n-driven translation system from scratch — 44 elements swap copy at runtime across five languages with zero page reload, including dynamically-rendered package cards. - Designed the video-first hero: muted autoplay forest footage behind a Bebas Neue display title (ADRENALINE FUN IN THE FOREST) and a dual CTA — Book now + View packages.
- Built the location-chip hero badge (RADOVLJICA, SLOVENIA) to disambiguate the venue from the Paintball Bled brand, which is physically in Radovljica despite the name.
- Wired the mobile experience: hamburger-triggered full-screen menu, touch-friendly phone CTA pinned in the header, and breakpoint-aware section padding that keeps the hero video readable on small screens.
- Set up staging at
nova.paintball-bled.comahead of the main-domain switchover so the client can preview and approve before production cut-over.
Challenges solved
- Multilingual tourism audience — a paintball venue in Slovenia draws Slovenian, English, German, Italian, and Spanish visitors. Shipping five languages without a CMS meant building a lightweight JSON-backed i18n layer that reads attribute keys at runtime rather than pre-rendering five site copies.
- Video hero that doesn't kill mobile performance —
<video autoplay muted loop playsinline>works everywhere, but the source (paintball3.mp4) had to be encoded small enough to start playing on 4G before the user scrolls, with a static poster fallback on data-saver connections. - Booking flow for groups, not individuals — the venue sells birthday parties, stag and hen-dos, and team-buildings. Copy, package tiers, and CTAs are tuned for a group organiser making one reservation on behalf of many, not a solo visitor picking a single slot.
Scope discipline is the real craft on a small site. No CMS, no framework, no booking plugin — a Vite bundle, five languages, one form, one CTA, shipped in days. The client gets fast; the visitor gets a working funnel.
What's under the hood.
Ready to fix, build,
or scale?
30 minutes, with me personally. I'll read your system like a log file and tell you what I'd do first. No pitch deck, no sales funnel.
— Davor Majc, founder, Numen