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Act 02Richa Jha case study

The anchor as the one who holds the thread

A TV anchor and Sanskrit scholar needed bookings, not just a portfolio. We staged her site as Sanskrit theatre and sent every enquiry to her WhatsApp.

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Client
Richa Jha
Industry
Anchor and voice-over artist (DD News, All India Radio, DD National)
Live
richajha.com
Built
Mar to Oct 2026, three design generations
Stack
Next.js 16, GSAP, ScrollTrigger, Lenis, Three.js, Cloudflare Workers
richajha.com on a desktop browser
richajha.com on a phone

Recorded on richajha.com, 20 Oct 2026.

01

The brief

Richa Jha anchors on TV and on stage, voices scripts in Hindi, English and Sanskrit, and is finishing a PhD in Sanskrit grammar. Her credits include DD News, All India Radio and DD National.

Her site was a portfolio. It showed the work, but it gave an event organiser or a brand no quick way to book her. So the brief became bookings: people land on the page and end up in her WhatsApp, ready to talk dates.

02

What we made

Three versions in seven months. Each one got closer to who she is.

  1. Version two was a comic book: halftone particles, speech bubbles, a floating 3D microphone and illustrated panels of Richa.

  2. Version three, Sutradhara, stages her career as a play: a prologue, five acts from 2012 to now, asides and a closing benediction, each titled in Devanagari with a transliteration. You drag a thread across the screen to begin, and the first line reads: "They gave me a mic. I never gave it back."

  3. A booking form (service, date, city, details) that turns into a ready-to-send WhatsApp message. No backend, no form service, no secret key to leak. If the browser blocks the pop-up, the visitor's details stay filled in and a plain link appears.

  4. Link previews fixed, so when someone shares her site on WhatsApp, her card shows up.

  • Next.js 16
  • GSAP
  • ScrollTrigger
  • Lenis
  • Three.js
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • richajha.com, desktop: prologue: the Sanskrit manuscript
  • richajha.com, desktop: Act II: the microphone and Act III: DD News
  • richajha.com, desktop: Act IV: the temple courtyard
  • richajha.com, mobile: prologue on a phone
  • richajha.com, mobile: Act I on a phone

03

The hard part

Moving a live personal brand from Vercel to Cloudflare without a minute of downtime. We exported DNS, kept Vercel warm as a rollback, set strict TLS, and sent the bare domain to www with every path intact.

Staging had its own trap. By default, a staging deploy inherits production routes and can quietly take over the live domain. So staging now ships with no routes, a noindex tag and an empty sitemap. The WhatsApp message builder is unit-tested too, including Devanagari, emoji and script-tag input.

04

Proof, with sources.

  • Live on her own domain since 6 Oct 2026.

    SourceDeployment record for richajha.com.

  • 22 commits across three design generations.

    SourceGit history of the richajha-anchor repo.

  • 15 media files, each tracked in a provenance log.

    SourceMedia provenance log in the repo.